Recently I asked the lovely people at Homestead House if they would consider sending me some more of their milk paint.  Although I have a good supply of blues and greens, I was completely out of pale neutrals like greys, creams and greiges.  In exchange for the paint I offered to help spread the word about Homestead House milk paint colors.

You see, I find it very hard to judge their milk paint colors by looking at their website.  I think it takes seeing a photo of something actually painted in the color to get a good feel for it.  Of course, photos and computer screens can still be misleading but it’s better than those squares of color that look nothing like the paint itself.

As it turns out, Homestead House is currently in the process of setting up a new website for their milk paint.  If you want to read more about that, check out Mary’s post over at Orphans with Makeup.  Mary’s photography is gorgeous, and I’m super excited to see how their new site turns out.  I can tell just from looking at Mary’s post that it’s going to be a vast improvement and you’ll be much better able to judge how the milk paint colors will look on whatever it is you plan to paint.

But in the meantime, not only did Homestead House send me some lovely neutral milk paints to play around with, they also sent me quite a few more colorful options and one of those is a shade called Maritime Blue.

Since I was dying to dive right in and get painting, I went out in the carriage house to look for something I could paint up quickly and I remembered this galvanized watering can that nnK gave me recently.  Her mom was going to toss it, and I think you can see why …

Who remembers the days of cows and sunflowers, and when people used to slap them on just about everything?

The first thing I did was wash the can with dish soap and water, and next I pounded out the dents by hitting them with a hammer from the inside which actually worked remarkably well.

Then I pulled out the Maritime Blue and mixed some up.  I gotta be honest here folks, that little dot of color on the paint bag didn’t really look like the paint color that I was mixing.

Here’s how the watering can looked with two quick coats of milk paint, but before any distressing or waxing.  I did not use any bonding agent.  My only prep was the washing.

As you can see, I did not get any chipping at all.  That definitely is not always the case when painting metal with milk paint, but this time I think the very flat black paint that was already on the can helped the milk paint to adhere.

The Maritime Blue looks very much like a powder blue without a top coat, but don’t forget, adding a top coat is always going to change up the color of your milk paint.  Sometimes by just a little, and sometimes by quite a lot.

I next sanded the edges and raised areas of the can for a distressed look, and then added a coat of Homestead House furniture wax which did indeed deepen the color a bit.

When my sister and I were out running around last Saturday we stopped into our local Bachman’s so that I could pick up some fresh flowers to fill the watering can.  The blue hydrangeas immediately jumped out at me, along with some white peonies and pink snapdragons.

 As it turns out Maritime Blue is the perfect color to go with blue hydrangeas, don’t you agree?

Since Homestead House was so very generous in supplying me with milk paint, I decided to pay it forward with a giveaway.

I’m giving away three bags of Homestead House milk paint to one lucky winner, a Laurentien (my favorite color, here’s how it looks), a Cartier (which is the color I used as a base coat on the spoon carved cupboard) and a Coal Black (you can see that here).

If you’d like a chance to win simply leave a comment on this post telling me what you would do with these three colors.  Be sure that you have used a valid email address when leaving your comment so that I can contact you if you win (no need to include your email address in the comment itself, just in the spot for it on the comment form, you’ll be sharing it with just me and not everyone else).  A winner will be chosen at random by Thursday at 5 pm and announced here on Friday (May 5, 2017).  Best of luck to you!