The Crackle Look

I had read about how to crackle furniture and wanted to give it a try. Crackle is sold in craft stores but can be quite expensive, so I decided to try another method I read about online. I chose a old wooden toy box that I had bought for a few dollars. This way if I screwed it up I would only have wasted a few dollars and not an expensive piece of furniture.

I started by painted the toy box with a primer and sanded any rough areas. Once this was dry I painted the inside with the brown colour I had chosen, I had chosen white for the exterior. The method I chose to crackle the outside is done with the use of white glue. You apply white glue to a small area, making sure the glue is fairly thick.  When the glue is sticky you paint over the glue with a coat of  paint, in this case I was using white. When the glue and paint dry together they crack, for more of crackle look and larger cracks make the glue thick. Because you have to work with the glue when it is sticky you have to do small areas at a time.

 I had glued on some wooden appliques to give the top of the box more character. Once I had crackled the whole box I left it to dry for a day. I wanted it to have an antique or aged look to it, so I applied a gel stain over top. Just dip a cloth into the gel and rub it on to the paint, rubbing it off so it would not go on to dark. The gel settled into the cracks and gave it a nice aged look. I applied a new handle to the top and put the original hardware back on after cleaning it up a bit. I was quite happy with the finished look and plan on trying this procedure on a larger piece of furniture in the future.
I use this box to store all of our DVD's and CD's, its quite a transformation from what it was before. A 3.00 dollar toybox gets a new look.