Paddy Roxburgh
Established Member
My ex and her husband have just moved to a new house, so my daughter and I made a coffee table for a New years/house warming present. My daughter spends three days a week with me and four days with her Mum, we all get on pretty well.
The table has an oak top made from some English oak (well actually Welsh oak) that I had left over from a boat fit our I did last year. The leg frame assembly I made from some redwood which we later painted.
I wanted Charlotte (our daughter) to be as involved as possible, but time was short so I made the components and Charlotte came to the dock with me and did the glue up. Plenty of fun hammering the mortises and tenons home while standing on my work bench. I planed the top after glue up and we took the lot back to my house for finishing. The top we finished with some quick dry poly. I wanted the leg frame assembly to be a chalk paint finish, however I left it a bit late to buy the paint, finding out I could only order it online and whilst researching I came across this post milk-paint-t16694.html Well Srit's post got me thinking and I decided we should make the paint. She loves making potions and all of this was done by her with my supervision After a bit more research I ditched the recipe from the thread in favour of the following.
Charlotte and her friend gently heated a litre of pasteurised skimmed milk and added half a cup of vinegar and put it in the airing cupboard for a couple of hours and let the curds and whey separate, apparently if you use curds you get a more mold resistant paint than just milk. She then poured the contents of the pan into a colander lined with cheese cloth. She rinsed the curds several times until the smell of vinegar was gone. In an old yogurt pot she weighed and ounce of hydrated lime and mixed it with a little water and then put the curds in the pot and mixed it well to form caesin (one annoying thing was I could only get 25KG of lime, so plenty left over for future projects). She then added some blue chalk powder (sold for refilling chalk lines), and mixed it until we liked the colour and painted three coats on the leg frame assembly.
The table has an oak top made from some English oak (well actually Welsh oak) that I had left over from a boat fit our I did last year. The leg frame assembly I made from some redwood which we later painted.
I wanted Charlotte (our daughter) to be as involved as possible, but time was short so I made the components and Charlotte came to the dock with me and did the glue up. Plenty of fun hammering the mortises and tenons home while standing on my work bench. I planed the top after glue up and we took the lot back to my house for finishing. The top we finished with some quick dry poly. I wanted the leg frame assembly to be a chalk paint finish, however I left it a bit late to buy the paint, finding out I could only order it online and whilst researching I came across this post milk-paint-t16694.html Well Srit's post got me thinking and I decided we should make the paint. She loves making potions and all of this was done by her with my supervision After a bit more research I ditched the recipe from the thread in favour of the following.
Charlotte and her friend gently heated a litre of pasteurised skimmed milk and added half a cup of vinegar and put it in the airing cupboard for a couple of hours and let the curds and whey separate, apparently if you use curds you get a more mold resistant paint than just milk. She then poured the contents of the pan into a colander lined with cheese cloth. She rinsed the curds several times until the smell of vinegar was gone. In an old yogurt pot she weighed and ounce of hydrated lime and mixed it with a little water and then put the curds in the pot and mixed it well to form caesin (one annoying thing was I could only get 25KG of lime, so plenty left over for future projects). She then added some blue chalk powder (sold for refilling chalk lines), and mixed it until we liked the colour and painted three coats on the leg frame assembly.
