What else would I call the black in my milk paint line?  I thought about “fan”, but that didn’t work for me, so I went with Typewriter, one of my other favorite vintage decorating elements.

Introducing this color was tricky for me because I don’t usually paint pieces entirely black.  It looks too heavy to me and I think you lose a lot of the detail of the piece.  So, I decided to leave the drawers wood, paint the body black and add a little decorative painting to the front.

Here’s how the dresser started…

Those stripes are contact paper.  I was about to rip them to shreds (figuratively) for being so ugly, but then I realized it was really pretty clever.  They applied a burled-looking contact paper in strips to look like inlay.  Ugly, but the idea is clever.  Very thrifty, too.  I pealed off the contact paper and went right to painting the body of the dresser.  Unfortunately, the stripes where the contact paper was showed through the paint, so I lightly sanded and applied a second coat.  That did the trick.  The front of the drawers were pretty gunky, so I stripped them to expose the pretty wood.

I chalked out a decorative design on the drawer fronts and painted in the details.  I didn’t want to heavily distress this piece, so I just lightly sanded the edges with a sanding sponge.  I didn’t do any prep work or add the bonding agent and the paint didn’t flake on this one.  You just never know!  I finished with my furniture wax, which turned the charcoal-looking paint to a soft black.

This was a fun piece and I love how it turned out.

I’m not hosting FFF tonight.  It’s a holiday week and about 123 degrees in most parts of the country, we’re going to skip a week.  No one should be painting furniture out in this heat!  (Well, I guess I broke that rule, but I was in my basement.)