First chalk paint project

I am sooo excited about sharing this project!  

 Back in the fall we had a customer from our friends' shop ask about topping her dining room table with zinc....

This post is about the painting and the next one will be about working with the zinc...

It's been awhile in the making and I'm breaking it up into a couple of posts...

she had purchased our metal topped aqua colored table awhile back and wanted to redo her kitchen furniture....these photos are of the furniture before...

So we told her then, we'd love to do it but wouldn't have time to get to it until after the Holidays.  In January she called the shop and we made all the arrangements to start the job.

She chose the "Emporer's Silk" Annie Sloan's chalk paint--- which I was thrilled about since I've yet to paint with it.  A great chance to get to use some!!!

So I painted a couple of chairs ...

Then my Father-in-law started having some health problems and ended up in the hospital.  He's doing better now, but we were really worried about him and it was a stressful month.  So things were put on hold for a little while but thankfully he's home and healing now!

The above photo is the table with one coat...it covers really well.  Definitely needed two coats, but it went really far.  I had a table (bottom only) and 7 chairs that all got two full coats of paint and I used just a little bit over 1 quart.

So the waxing...which comes before distressing...a little different from latex!
 I think with the first chair I waited too long to distress and the wax got too hard.  It went better when I distressed after the wax had only been on there for about 20 minutes or so.  
And it distresses so smoothly.  There's no peeling or stickiness at all...a nice hard finish.

 This photo cracks me up because we keep saying "If we had more room we could take on bigger projects..." but we take them on anyways and somehow it all works out....
so there they are lined up in our crazy garage...

The photo below is the "finished" look...2 coats of paint, one coat of clear wax, and finished with a little dark wax.  I didn't use Annie Sloan's dark wax because the customer wanted these to match the aqua table's finish.  I used my own recipe of mixing paint with Minwax paste wax so everything would match...

This is the chair painted with the "Sprinkler" color to match the table she previously purchased.

Working with the zinc is so much fun because it's such a unique look.  I can't wait to post about that too....I took lot's of photos of the whole process to share with whoever 's out there in blogland looking!

It's food safe, and a fairly soft metal so it's easy to shape and cut.  And I actually soldered a corner myself....oh yes I did.  

One of the many reasons I love working with my husband-- He teaches me anything that I want to know and always encourages me.  

I'm even thinking about covering a little table all by myself --but that's another post altogether...next post will be about topping this table...stay tuned