How to Give a Vintage Look to a New Bread Board

Hi everyone! I hope you had a great week-end. I attended just one estate sale on Saturday and surprisingly came away with quite a few purchases, mostly items for future projects. I’ll share my finds tomorrow. Meanwhile, I want to tell you about an awesome girl’s night out that I hosted recently.

I found myself chatting with some crafty girlfriends at church one day and we decided a craft night for a few of us ladies was in order. We invited a couple of other gals along and set a date. This past Thursday night we met at my place, and for a couple of hours we chatted and laughed and learned how to give a vintage look to new wooden bread boards.

Not too long ago I came across several bread boards for a reasonable price at a garage sale. They provided the perfect opportunity to demonstrate a painting technique that allows you to make something new look old.

Here’s a plain, unfinished bread board, similar to the ones we used for this project.

Our first step was to give the boards a coat of brown chalk paint. We used hair dryers to speed up the process and then applied a second coat to the edges only.

For this project, we used Americana Decor’s “Rustic.” The idea is for this brown coat to show through our pretty top coat, here and there, to give the project an aged look, after some light sanding.

NOTE: I added some unsanded grout to the paint so it would go on thicker and stand up better to some sanding.

Also, keep in mind that if you pick up a piece you’d like to paint using this technique, and it’s already stained or painted, you can skip this step entirely and simply apply a top coat of chalk paint.

You can see here how the “Rustic” brown paint shows through the one coat of pretty “Agave” blue Waverly paint, which is similar to DecoArt “Escape” blue. (Some of the gals also used one of my favorite colors, DecoArt “New Life” green.)

After using the hair dryer to dry our various coats of paint, we distressed the edges with sand paper and smoothed the top surface with the sand paper, allowing some of the brown to peek through.

I have large foam letter stamps that I like to use on projects like this, but stencils would work perfectly, too. Once dry, you can lightly sand your word to smooth and distress, if you choose.

Our final step was to apply some wax, following the product directions. I like to use Minwax paste wax. If you like, you can further age your project by mixing some dark stain into your wax, say an 1/2 a teaspoon of stain to 1 tablespoon of wax.

I did not choose to do that for this project, but I did on my clock-face table not too long ago.

And here’s the finished product.

Look at those beautiful, smiling faces! They each did a fantastic job and really seemed to enjoy the process.

One of the gals, a non-crafter, surprised herself, I think, with the attractiveness of her finished product. Thanks Beverly, Linda, Helen, and Marsha for hanging out with me. You guys are awesome.

Another chalk paint project you might like: