Where the walnut trees grow: Crackle finish using school glue

Recently I posted about my own personal cleaning challenge and crafts or tips found on Pinterest that helped me execute the tasks. One task I challenged myself to do was organize my neglected shelves in the laundry room. Above my washer and dryer is a single shelf. Hubs and I have had on our ever growing task list “put up cabinets in laundry room.” Well, it has been on that list for what seems like a decade and still has not been done. And there are several justifiable reasons…money to purchase the wood or prefab cabinets being the biggest reason. We have since used our saved money for this task on fixing a broken water heater, purchasing a chest freezer, and putting it toward other unexpected repairs for our little farm house. So I do my best to keep these open shelves cleaned and organized. And sometimes it just gets piled up with stuff.

I have some little wooden crates that came from Clementine oranges that I use to hold a few things on my laundry room shelf. For a long time now, they have been sitting up on the shelf in their original state. I decided that my “reward” for getting the shelf cleaned up and organized was painting these crates. And I have wanted to try a paint crackling technique using school glue that I happened across on Pinterest.

Here is the great tutorial I found:

(http://makethebestofthings.blogspot.com/2010/05/crackle-finish-with-elmers-glue.html)

The technique was simple and easy to do. I chose a dark color for the base then I mixed up a lighter version of the base color for the top coat. I did not use a primer coat since I chose such a dark color for the first layer of paint. I was even surprised that this technique worked on a cardboard version of the Clementine Crates. I did use a white primer coat for that crate since it had a very colorful print on it and I was using lighter colors. Here are a few of my pictures of the process: