Unicorn Spit Ikea Table Hack

 

I love kitchen tables and all of the life that happens around them. This is the spot where you feed your baby mashed-up carrots for the first time. Then you blink and you’re making her breakfast for the first day of school.

This is the spot where birthday candles are blown out, where wishes are made. It’s where a silly cousin can make a funny face and you laugh so hard, you get frosting everywhere.

My sister Colleen’s kitchen table is perfect for her home—small enough to tuck into the space between her kitchen and living room, but big enough to comfortably hold her family of five. (Six, counting the dog, Pete, who hangs out underneath this table waiting for somebody to drop something.)

A lot of life happens around Colleen’s table—and it was starting to show.

We’re not sure if those are stab marks from the baby’s fork or claw marks from Pete hopping up to swipe leftovers when he thinks nobody is looking.

Colleen’s table came from Ikea and is made of pressed wood with a slick laminate top. This type of furniture can be tricky to paint and usually involves a lot of prep work like sanding the slick surface and applying a primer to help the paint stick. These steps—while important—can be time-consuming. Then it takes a few coats of paint with a lot of drying time in between.

That’s with regular latex paint. We had a secret weapon: Dixie Belle Paint, the new line of No VOC, chalk/mineral paint we are carrying at our shop, All Things New Again, in Leesburg, Virginia. Dixie Belle Paint does not require sanding or priming on most projects.

We decided to put it to the test!

Here’s the awesome news …

Dixie Belle Paint sticks to Ikea!! No sanding, no priming required! And it sticks beautifully. Look at this coverage on the first swipe of paint… The color is called The Gulf, a creamy, dreamy swirl of green-blue that matches Colleen’s kitchen perfectly.

I love that Dixie Belle paint covers Ikea furniture so nicely. You don’t need any fancy equipment to prep your piece. You don’t need to buy a lot of products to make it work. Just a quart (or a sample jar!) of paint and a brush, you are good to go.

Opens up a lot of possibilities, doesn’t it?

But I wasn’t finished yet!

I could have come back the next day, applied a second coat of Dixie Belle to make the table perfect, seal it with a polycrylic and have a really nice kitchen table.

Instead I came back the next day with my Traveling Spit Kit!

That’s Unicorn Spit, another new line we are carrying at All Things New Again and right here in our online store. Unicorn Spit is a non-toxic rainbow gel stain and glaze in one.

It has a variety of applications—and they are all awesome!

If you sand down a table to bare wood, you can use Unicorn Spit as a stain. Instead of regular ol’ brown wood stain, you can create a rainbow of colors. I used Blue Thunder with a hint of Pixie Punk Pink on this little table I did for my living room.

That look wouldn’t work on Colleen’s table because there was no beautiful wood grain underneath the laminate—just ugly particle board. I couldn’t apply the Unicorn Spit directly to the Ikea wood because it was too slick, but the Dixie Belle Paint as a base coat gave me a wonderful canvas to create an entirely different look.

I watched a few video tutorials. Then I loaded White Ning into one of those little syringes you use to give medicine to babies and I created a circular pattern like a snail shell on the tabletop. I came back and added three more colors in the same pattern: Midnight’s Blackness, Purple Hill Majesty and Zia Teal.

Now comes the fun part! I squirted some water on my hand so it would glide across the table. I started in the center and pulled my hand down to the edge of the table like a spoke on a bicycle wheel. This blended all of the colors of Unicorn Spit along the way. I repeated this step all the way around the table until I had a wonderful starburst look called an Aura Blast.

Unicorn Spit must be sealed with an oil-based sealer. We used Minwax Polyurethane. It does a really cool trick of making the Unicorn Spit design look three-dimensional in person. (Not so much in the photographs.) Colleen applied four coats of polyurethane, letting each coat dry really well.

What was once an ordinary Ikea table

is now a one-of-a-kind work of art!

Then for extra protection, Colleen had a piece of glass cut to fit the table.

After all, a lot of life happens here!

~ Courtney

All Things New Again is a family-owned furniture and paint boutique in Leesburg, Virginia about an hour or so west of Washington, D.C. We were one of the first retail locations in the country for Unicorn Spit non-toxic rainbow gel stain and glaze. Here’s the link again to our online store. We ship throughout the United States.

We also designed our Introduction to Unicorn Spit class to teach you several techniques to help you get started with this awesome product. You don’t need an art degree or 20 years of experience to create one-of-a-kind functional art for your home. You just need a little Unicorn Spit!