jezzicasprojects

Today on my way home from work I couldn’t resist a quick stop at Michaels for a little craft shopping therapy. While cruising the aisles I spotted this cute little wooden bird house for $1. I have been wanting to try using glue as a crackle medium and so I said to myself why not practice on this? Wouldn’t a little birdhouse look so cute hanging from the ladder/garden art? Sure I have a million other things I should be doing but this is a small project it won’t take long, right? So I paid my dollar and rushed home to get started!

I used some brown acrylic paint for the base coat. Then because I was lacking in patience I used a blow dryer to make it dry faster.

Next step according to the tutorial on the Elmer’s Glue Site is to brush Elmer’s Wood Glue on top of base coat. I didn’t have wood glue so I used some Elmer’s School Glue that is at least 2 years old. According to the folks at Elmer’s : A thicker coat results in larger cracks – apply a thinner coat for fine cracks. So I did a thickish coat, because school glue is thinner than wood glue.

Then it gets tricky: While glue is tacky, brush on top coat. How do you define tacky? I ran my blow dryer over it until it started to dull a little. Then I brushed on my top coat of off white latex paint (Behr Premium Plus Ultra). It didn’t do anything. I ran the blow dryer over it and then as it started to dry it crackled! I noticed that the crackle was along my brush stroke lines so on the front I used shorter brush strokes to get more crackle.

My goal of trying glue for crackle medium was achieved. And I like the fact that you can mix and match paints – I used craft store acrylic and latex paint. I plan to paint and distress one of my garbage picked ladders and I wanted some crackle on it so now I can tackle my bigger project.
And the bird house does look cute hanging on the ladder in the garden.