What better way to come back from a blogging vacation than to jump right into the heart of what we love to do on this blog: share the disastrous side of DIY!  We’ve done a fair amount of this (because we’ve created a fair amount of disasters) from doorknob painting fails and cement easels that fell apart to tutorials on how NOT to install a toilet.  We’ve also told the harrowing tales of struggle and redemption when things go wrong with ultimately successful projects, like when I tried to build a table or Sage tried to install her own floors.

Well, I’ve got a quick and ugly one for you today!  And, unfortunately, this story doesn’t have a happy ending – so prepare yourself.

It all started when I read this post on Fall for DIY about creating a faux ceremic glaze look on stuff made out of craft clay.  I’d actually been trying to figure out how to get that effect for a while, and this was a cool approach.  Plus, it looked so easy!   I like making stuff out of Femo, but I’m usually unsatisfied by how “homemade” it looks.  The temptation of being able to make it look ceramic was strong.

Her approach was to mix a small amount of acrylic paint with some polyeurathane varnish, let it settle and separate, and then apply it somewhat loosely with a paintbrush.  She got a beautiful watercolor effect with a lot of variation – not exactly like a ceramic glaze, but remeniscent of it and very pretty.  Seriously, go click that link and check it out – you’ll need it to contrast what I ended up making!

I had a relatively big project in mind that I wanted to use this finish for, so I decided to test out the technique before jumping in.  (SO glad I did!)  I started by making a silly star-thing out of clay to test it out on, figuring that if I messed it up I wouldn’t be devastated.

Once I baked it, I was ready to try out the glaze.  I used what I had on hand, a polycrylic finish in gloss and some craft paints in yellow and light blue serenity.

I loosly mixed the polycrylic with dabs of the craft paint, let it settle a bit, and applied it to my ridiculous star-thing.

I could tell right away this wasn’t going to work.  The paint and the polycrylic had mixed too well and hadn’t settled out much.  I applied globs trying to get a nice dripped look like you sometimes see in ceremics, but it just ended up looking… globby.

I also wasn’t getting much variation in the finish.  I tried to help this by adding some plain poly around the edges, but it just made it look wierd.  Still, I soldiered on and added the light blue in the name of blog content to see if that would have a better effect (it didn’t).

Did it look better after it dried?  Nope.

It looks kind of like something an kindergartener would bring home and make you put on display.  You can kind of see whispers of how it is supposed to look in the way the light blue pooled around the dots, but overall it is just really bad.

The drips didn’t work out, either.

Ugh.  Globby.

Needless to say, I am REALLY happy I tried this out before investing time, energy, and emotion into a project only to see it ruined.  I may still try again, and here is what I think I would do differently:

• I won’t mix it as thick or as well.  The tutorial said to use one part paint for every ten parts poly, and to only mix roughly.  A looser mix would have helped with the drips, as well!
• I will use darker colors of paint.  The tutorial worked well with a dark blue, where I think it is easier to mix only a little paint for a large amount of the varnish.  Because I used light colors, I had to add more paint for it to show up, which ended up making it apply more like paint than a faux glaze.
• I might try a non-water based poly!  The tutorial also used a water-based one, but I wonder if it would get better variation if I tried this.  It could work, or it could be a total disaster!  What do you think?

Well, I hope you’ve had a laugh at this!  What advice do you have for me to improve this if I decide to try again?  Have you had any projects go wrong recently?