The Finished High Chair

I took a couple of evenings earlier this week to get the continuous-arm high chair finished up. I was pretty dissatisfied with the effect of the black milk paint on my chair from last fall, so I decided to go back to where I began. A couple of years ago, I bought a cheap, falling-apart factory-made Windsor chair from an “antique” store in Mississippi. I took it completely apart and re-shaped every one of the ill-conceived parts into a more pleasing and historically sympathetic form. Upon re-assembly and finishing, the chair immediately became one of my favorites and has graced our dining room table ever since.

On that chair, I used homemade red milk paint as the base coat using red iron oxide as the pigment. That paint turned out lovely. I then tried to concoct some black milk paint using powdered charcoal as pigment. I may as well have painted it with dirty dishwater. The milk paint didn’t have enough substance to provide the opacity required to achieve good coverage. Fortuitously, I found that a bit of finely powdered charcoal mixed with shellac created a lovely black paint, and the finish has held up well and aged beautifully over the past couple of years. Hence, I determined to re-create the same finish on the high chair.

With the red milk paint fully cured over the weekend, I gave it a good rubbing down with a crumpled brown paper bag to achieve a lovely low luster. I find that milk paint performs far better when allowed to cure a few days before rubbing it out. Too soon, and you’ll just wear through the finish. I don’t always have the time or the patience to wait, but three or four days is optimal.

With the milk paint readied, I proceeded to mix up my shellac paint as best as I could remember. The charcoal powder I procured some years earlier from a pyrotechnic supplier. It was dirt cheap – around $25 for 5 lbs worth – and should last me several lifetimes (if I live that long). It is not as finely ground as lampblack, a more common black pigment which can also be obtained from pyrotechnic suppliers. I sifted the charcoal through a reusable brass mesh coffee filter prior to mixing, to remove the coarser bits. A mortar and pestle would be welcome, but I don’t have one.

I found that a ratio of 1-2 tsp. of charcoal per 1 Tbsp. of shellac (orange, 3-lb cut) made a serviceable paint. A bit of experimentation is required to achieve the proper consistency, but if you get it right, it will go on quite smoothly with a synthetic bristle brush. I use a 1-1/2″ brush for the larger surfaces and a cheap artist’s brush for the nooks, crannies, and spindles.

The finish should not be applied too thickly or it will orange-peel, just like straight shellac. But you can apply multiple thin coats in fairly quick succession. I put two coats on in one evening, then allowed it to cure overnight. You do not want to begin rubbing the shellac until it is fully cured. A Scotch-Brite pad and some judicious use of 400-grit sandpaper on some stubborn rough patches yielded a lovely smooth satin sheen.

Finally, I topped off the shellac with a coat of tinted oil. The finish was nothing more than a bit of charcoal powder mixed with boiled linseed oil. To be truthful, I should have skipped the tinting altogether. The charcoal did not seem to add any coverage to the finish – rather, it only served to make the chair messy and annoying to handle until the oil was fully cured. Next time I’ll skip the tinting and just apply pure BLO or a thin wiping varnish.

I can’t say that the finish is perfect. There are some spots that are too thick, and some rough patches that I simply ran out of the will to smooth. But I can say with certainty that it is the best finish I have achieved yet on any of my chairs. The new owner is equally pleased and was rather excited to eat his bowl of cereal while seated upon his new perch this morning.

Indulging My Masochistic Tendencies with More Milk Paint

One thing about my chair that caught some attention when I posted pictures on Instagram was the stumpy nubs on the feet. To answer any questions that may have popped into your head: no, I’m not planning on leaving the stumps. I just prefer to keep those on until after assembling the undercarriage. This allows me to pop them back on the lathe to turn the tapered tenons that pierce the seat after they’ve had a chance to super-dry in the kiln.

In this case, I was very glad I didn’t cut the stumps off prematurely. Elia Bizzarri had suggested 22″ legs for the high chair. I ended making them 23″ long (plus the ~1.5″ stumps) just to make sure they’d be long enough. Well, after assembling the chair, my wife wisely suggested that we put it in front of the table with my son in it, so I would know how much to cut off. Turns out, if I had cut the stumps off as I had planned, the chair would have been uncomfortably short for him. Dodged a bullet there, but now I had to turn the stumps flush with the feet, and it was a *bit* too late to put them onto the lathe again.

So, on to Plan B:

Split off as much as I dared…

Shave the remainder flush with a drawknife and spokeshave…

And sand to smooth them out.

Now I’m left with much more normal-looking feet.

And with that, the chair was ready for a finish. If you’ll recall, I got rather frustrated using milk paint on the Tavern Table and decided to experiment with some alternatives – namely, oil paint and tinted shellac – in the future. I still plan to do just that, but since I still have a hundred bucks’ worth of milk paint laying around the shop, I figured it would be prudent to press on and try to make peace with it.

I mixed up some Barn Red from Old-Fashioned Milk Paint, using 4 tbsp of powder to 8 tbsp warm water. I let the mixture sit for an hour or so and double-filtered it with cheese cloth. It started going on just beautifully – a smooth, thin coat, more like ink than like paint. But some some reason, after about 30 minutes (it takes me 45 minutes to an hour to paint a chair, by the way) the mixture started foaming up for no apparent reason. There were no bubbles in the mixture, yet as soon as I brushed it on, it would look like this:

Just a few small bubbles in the finish – nothing to worry about…

But as I brushed the coat to smooth it and spread it, it just worked itself up into a foamy, lathery mess, like this:

Yuck. This is one of the reasons I swore off milk paint in the first place.

There was nothing I could do. I tried adding some more water to the mix, but that didn’t help. No amount of stirring made a difference. It was annoying and disappointing. Luckily, after about 5 minutes of drying, I found that I could go back over the bubbly areas with a semi-dry brush and smooth them down. The most egregious spots were in the crevices around the turnings, where the bubbles seemed to accumulate the most.

In the end, I was able to smooth the finish to an acceptable degree, and I think it will look reasonably good after burnishing with a bit of brown paper. Still more effort than I think a good finish should require. If I’m not pleased with the appearance after burnishing, I’ll give the milk paint a coat of red oxide oil paint to even it out some more. My wife is liking the red color, so we may just leave it solid red rather than proceeding with a black topcoat, as I’ve done in the past.

 

Final Chapter on the Tavern Table

Wow, I see that almost a month has passed since my last post on the tavern table. Hard to believe it’s been that long, but I’ve finally completed the finish after pecking away at it on evenings and weekends. I honestly think it may be the last time I use milk paint for a long while. I love the results, but it is ridiculously labor-intensive. Look for some experimentation with alternatives – oil paints and tinted shellac – in future blog posts.

When I left off, I had just burnished the second coat of ‘Goldenrod’ and applied a layer of orange shellac.

It’s a bit gaudy to modern eyes at this point, though I believe a color similar to this was pretty popular for Windsor chairs in the late 1700s (those folks liked brighter colors than we tolerate today).

The next step was to cover the Goldenrod with a couple coats of ‘Peacock’.

Originally, my plan was to paint the top the same color as the base, but once I got the Peacock on the base, I realized that the table actually looked really good with a contrasting top. I decided that a layer of red paint, judiciously rubbed through to the yellow below, might look even better.

Rather than marching forward with more milk paint, I decided to experiment with some oil paint instead:

Making oil paint does not require fancy materials. I used some boiled linseed oil, red iron oxide pigment, and turpentine. (Long-time readers might know that I’ve complained about boiled linseed oil before due to its metallic dryers, but its rapid drying time was too tempting in this case for a project that has already dragged on for far too long.)

I don’t have a fancy glass muddler, but a glass bowl and a teaspoon seems to work fine. I used 1/4 tsp. pigment, 1 tsp. oil, and 1/2 tsp. turpentine. I made that up on the spot, so don’t make the mistake of assuming that there is any magic behind those proportions. It did make a fine paint of good consistency.

I gave the top a washcoat of Peacock, which dried overnight before I used the oil paint. The effect of layering different colors gives a natural irregularity to the color, which I enjoy.

And here is the tabletop with two coats of the red paint. Quite nice, I think. I like this much more than a solid-color table.

The final step was to rub down the whole table with Scotch-Brite pads. I tried to simulate age by rubbing through the top coat in predictable locations: around the drawer knob, on the corners and edge of the top and legs, and especially on the tops of the stretchers where feet should rest. I stopped short of “distressing” the piece with dents, scratches, rasping, and sanding. I don’t have the willpower to spend the time on a good and realistic distressed finish, and a poorly distressed piece (AKA “shabby chic”) is, shall we say, not to my taste.

Finally, after an hour of burnishing, the table was ready for its final coat: a layer of home-brewed wiping varnish (1/3 boiled linseed oil, 1/3 satin oil varnish, 1/3 turpentine).

The final coat highlighted my second major annoyance with milk paint (the first being labor): It changes color dramatically when the oil is applied. I quite liked the blue-green appearance of the unfinished milk paint. But the second you apply the varnish (or oil, or shellac, or any other protective finish), the color darkens more than you might expect.

Before Varnish

After Varnish

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m quite happy with the final appearance of the table. I’m just annoyed that I couldn’t predict how it would look until after the varnish was applied. If I had a specific color that I was trying to match, I would have been far more annoyed. The nice thing about oil paints and tinted shellac is that the color looks pretty much the same when it’s mixed, when it’s going on, and when it dries. Milk paint, on the other hand, has one shade when you mix it, a different shade completely when it dries, and yet another completely different shade when you finish it. Unless you are deeply familiar with the product, it’s just unpredictable.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. How about some glamour shots of the finished table?

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Crawling to the Finish Line.

There’s no way around it: finishing a Windsor chair is a painstaking process. It can also be a pretty scary process, because the chair will look terrible until the very last step is complete. You just have to do your best and trust that it will all work out in the end. My finishing process seems pretty typical for modern Windsor chairmakers:

1. Stain the wood
2. Paint with milk paint
3. Sand the first coat with 320-grit
4. Another coat of milk paint
5. Burnish the second coat with steel wool or Scotch-Brite
6. A final coat of milk paint (usually a different color from the first two)
7. Burnish the final coat of paint
8. Seal the paint with oil

You might use more coats of paint, depending on the effect you’re going for, but the process will be more-or-less the same. I decided to use a black-on-red paint job to match a Windsor chair that I re-finished a couple of years ago. Eventually, I’d like to have a whole set of these things for our dinner table.

The stain that you choose isn’t particularly critical. It’s not supposed to show at all; it’s only there so, in case the paint wears through in a few years, you don’t see the fresh white wood poking through the finish. Peter Galbert uses a homemade brown stain made from walnut husks. I have a bunch of water-soluble dyes that a fellow woodworker gave me a few years back, so that’s what I used. I’m not even sure what brand it is, because it came in hand-labeled jars. You can just use whatever you want, but I would avoid oil-based stains, since they take so long to dry and could cause issues with the milk paint adhering if it isn’t fully cured.

As I said before, the chair will look like crap from the moment you apply the dye until the moment that you seal the paint with oil. Brace yourself:

See, I told you. I hate stain, but in this case, it’s called for.

Stain is unforgiving. It will hunt down your mistakes and highlight them for all to see. It will point at you and laugh. If the stain is meant to be seen, that’s a bad thing, but in this case, it’s actually quite helpful. I thought I had done a good job cleaning up the glue squeeze-out. I was wrong.

The water-based dye does not soak into the glue spots as it does on the wood, so they stand out prominently when the stain is applied. This gives me a chance to clean them up with a bit of sanding before I proceed with the paint. Next time, I’ll try to be more careful with the glue.

When the stain is completely dry, you can proceed with milk paint. Mixing milk paint is an art unto itself. Bottom line: Don’t use the directions that come with the package. Go read this blog post from Elia Bizzarri. My base coat is “Barn Red” from The Old-Fashioned Milk Paint Company. It’s really darker than I would have preferred for the base coat, but I had some on hand so it’s what I used. “Salem Red” would have been a better choice, but I forgot how dark Barn Red was until after it was dry.

The first coat looks pretty good from a distance, but while I was applying it, I noticed that it seemed unusually grainy. Apparently the sieve that I used wasn’t fine enough and I failed to get all the dregs out of the paint. Bummer. Have a closer look:

The first coat required far more sanding than I was anticipating to get all of that crap off. For the second coat, I used a re-usable mesh coffee filter to strain the paint, and the results were much better.

After letting this coat dry, I burnished the paint with a Scotch-Brite pad and proceeded with the final coat of paint. This time, I used “Arabian Night” from The Real Milk Paint Co. Peter Galbert spoke highly of this company on his blog and in his book, so I decided to give their paint a shot. I found that there was much less of the coarse material in their paint, so it didn’t require filtration like the paint from Old-Fashioned Milk Paint. It’s always nice to cut out a step, so I’ll be using their paint from now on.

With a black-on-red finish, the red milk paint is supposed to show through just a bit – you don’t want too thick of a coat. But it does need to go on evenly. The trick is to put it on a bit thicker than you want, then use the Scotch-Brite to rub it off to the desired level of show-through.

The black paint looks terrible when dry, with some of the chalk rising to the surface and drying with a grayish cast. This is as far as I’ve gotten, so I’m crossing my fingers that a bit of burnishing and a coat of oil will make all right with the world. Wish me luck.