We decided to give our oldest our queen bed when we move into the new house.  Then when people come to visit she can bunk with her sister and give them her room with a bigger bed.  I have been wanting to redo our headboard for a while and this gave me the perfect excuse.  My journey was long and filled with failure.  Here is what I started with:

You can’t really tell but it has a decorative strip of ivy at the top and it was very country.  Time for a change.  “Love’s” favorite color is blue.  So I was thinking wouldn’t it be awesome to do a crackle finish with turquoise peaking through white.  Good Idea yes??  Ok so here were my thoughts, first I need to get a turquoise undercoat.  Spray paint to the rescue.  Right you are with me so far?  Sounds like a good idea.  Ok so here is what you get:

Ok looks good so far.  I got the crackle medium from Lowes.  Home Depot does not carry it any more .  Ok next step is to brush on the Crackle Medium.  {I don’t have a picture of this step because the medium is clear and you cannot tell}  Then top coat time.  I thought I was being smart.  I thought spray paint won’t work for the top coat cus it goes on so thin and you need several coats and that will mess with the cracking.  So I got a quart of antique white.  Still sounds ok maybe?

Not.so.much!!

Yep that is my hubby peeling all that white paint off.

You think that is a cloth in my hand don’t you?  Nope it is white paint that we peeled off the headboard.

So here is what I learned.  Maybe you guys already knew this but I didn’t. 

Spray paint is oil based

Crackle medium is latex {water}

Water and Oil don’t mix.  If you put them together they will just peel off.  Like ours did.  So as easy as spray paint can be if you want to use latex anything with it, then you need to stick with latex.

There are lots on conflicting opinions out there about oil and latex.  Some say if you sand well and clean with TSP {commercial grade cleaner available at Home improvement stores} then you can do it.  Some say you can only do oil over latex, some say you can only do latex over oil.  I say just avoid it all and stick with the same base for your paint.  Either oil or latex.  Then you know it will be ok.   

So what did we end up doing?  We kept the blue sprayed bottom layer, and we rubbed candle wax over the areas we wanted to look distressed.  Then we painted oil antique white over the top and sanded it down.  So the blue would show through.  Here is the result:

And here is a close up so you can see the distressing:

You can see when you rub the wax on first, it comes off more “chippy” than just sanding.  It also comes off way easier.  I hope you guys can use my mistake to never have to do this yourself.  But in the end I like how it came out.  I will get you a picture in her room once we move in and get settled.

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