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I just finished this wine rack a couple weeks ago to send to my sister for giftmas:

It's pine, painted "soldier blue" with milkpaint. I used walnut for the drawer front, the bottle holders and the backing boards, the complex crown molding on top is poplar, which takes details crisper than the pine does, the base molding is pine. It's hung with a French cleat

Like all of my woodworking this project was done completely by hand, no electrons were harmed in the construction of this project. All of the major components to this little wine rack were all built with techniques I've used on several projects and went very smoothly, I finished it in a little over three weeks. However a lot of the finishing details were new to me. The lipped drawer is a first for me (I've usually done flush fitting inset drawers) as are the rabbeted, half blind dovetails you can see above and the 'thumbnail' profile cut around the edge of the drawer front. This was also the first time I used milkpaint on a nice piece of furniture, the only other project I've used it on is a little toolbox I built a couple months ago.

The milkpaint is really quite interesting. It's one of the first paints ever used by people and as the name suggests it uses proteins extracted from milk as it's bonding agent. It comes as a dry powder and you must mix it with water. Since it's water based it dries very quickly, it has a very mild odor, is completely non-toxic and doesn't give off any toxic fumes while drying. It's simple to apply and you can wash your brush in the kitchen sink.

It differs from modern oil and latex based paints in a few not so good ways too. For starters it goes bad after about 24 hours after being mixed so you have to careful to mix only as much as you need, learned that the hard way. The biggest surprise to modern wood workers is that even though it's easy to apply it's really not a one step finish. When it first dries (even the second coat) it's much lighter than expected and has almost a chalky look to it.

To really get a rich color you have to oil it with a curing vegetable oil like linseed oil or tung oil. It's also prone to picking up dirt, water marks and oily finger smudges so a more durable topcoat is often applied, like lacquer or shellac. I finished off this wine rack with linseed oil and topcoated with blond shellac. In this way it's a lot more like regular finishing in woodworking instead a quick and easy approach you usually associate with paint. In fact I really gained a new found appreciation for what goes into hand painting something with a nice even coat and I'm looking forward to using milkpaint on future projects more often.

While this wine rack isn't strictly speaking a period reproduction it's built with pretty solid 18th century techniques and styling; Variations on this type of cabinet design could be found throughout colonial America. And in my case most of the tools used would be pretty familiar to 18th century craftsmen as well.

Cheers,

Josh

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