A friend of mine from work, Shelby, is getting married on August 20th! Well, let me back up and give you a little history. When I first started working at the DOB, there were three other girls in my office that I quickly became friends with - Shelby, April, and Melissa. Well, Melissa moved to Houston and transferred to our DOB office down there about three years ago (maybe four? I can't remember). And April resigned about a year ago. :( So that left just me and Shelby in the Arlington office (and out of our office of approximately 20 examiners, there were only 4 girls, including us! So sad.). Well, Melissa moved back to the Dallas area last month, and she came back to our office! So, since the four of us have remained close, we try to get together for dinner every now and again. Which is actually harder than it should be since: 1) we travel out of town for work a lot, 2) April lives in Wylie, 3) Shelby lives in Grapevine/Trophy Club, and 4) Melissa and I live in Arlington/Grand Prairie. We always get together around Christmas for dinner, and then throughout the year, when our schedules come together, we schedule dinner!
Okay, so Shelby is getting married August 20th!! So the four of us decided to get together for dinner to see Melissa's new house and make wedding signs for Shelby. She was kind of going for the vintagey-chic look, so I started googling around to see how we could accomplish the crackle-finish on her painted signs. I figured we'd just crackle the paint and then use an Exacto knife to carefully cut out the wording she wanted and Mod Podge it to the signs. Easy enough, right? Well, that's when I came across this website. Use iron-on transfer paper for the signs?? That would be so much easier! Done! And I found this website that claimed that Elmer's glue would give us the crackled paint finish we wanted. Okay, so spoiler alert: One of these techniques worked amazingly well, and the other was an epic failure. So here's what we did:
These are our supplies: base color acrylic craft paint (black), top color acrylic craft paint (white), Elmer's glue, foam brushes.
Then, brush on the Elmer's glue - not too thick, but not so thin that it dries immediately.
Then, when the glue starts to dry and get "tacky", you'll want to brush on your top coat of paint. The glue will kind of bubble when it starts to dry and just use your finger to see if it's tacky - you want it to be sticky, not gloppy like wet glue. When you brush on your top coat of paint over the glue, brush it on in one direction and try not to go over the glue over and over again. Just one coat should do ya. When the paint and the glue start to dry, you'll see it start to crackle, and you should be left with something like this!
Success! So, as you can see, Elmer's glue + acrylic craft paint = crackled paint success! Which leads me to the epic failure...iron on transfer paper to add print to the signs. I didn't even take a picture. They looked pretty terrible. We tried it on three of the small signs, and the text transferred blurry and weird for some reason. So I painted over them. April's going to use her Cricut to cut out vinyl lettering for them instead. So the painted signs will sit until April mails me the vinyl lettering (you know, since she lives all the way in Wylie). Oh well, live and learn! I still need to get some sandpaper and sand the edges, so they look more weathered, but I think they turned out really well!
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