Hello, I’m Annie Sloan. Welcome to my studio. There are five questions that I get asked frequently about Wax and I’m going to answer them today.
So I get asked ‘do I have to wax my furniture?’. Yes, you do. If you don’t it’s going to get marked – water will harm it. You need to be able to protect it in some way, and I devised the wax to go with the paint. I think the wax is the most beautiful, I really love it. It’s got a lovely mellow feel to it – a lovely mellow sheen. You can lacquer as well but my preferred thing is Wax.
So this is the Clear Wax – it looks white but it’s not. This is my wax brush and I’m just going to load it up…I’m going to load quite a lot up on there. So, you can see the amount of wax on there and basically, I’m going to start waxing. I think people have got their different ways of waxing… I prefer to do quite long marks, some people liketo do that, that’s fine you can. For me it’s just straight up and down and keep going. I would do an area at a time, so I’m doing this central area here. [I] didn’t load it up enough… you want to have quite a lot on there so you can move it around quickly. Going each and every way so that you make certain that you get everywhere done. I’m going to open that up… So now you can see in some areas it’s slightly thicker than others. I’ve got white bits there showing up, that’s fine you don’t need to fiddle too much, it’s gone everywhere, you’ll see that it’s covered because it’s gone slightly darker.
So the second question I get asked is “how to remove excess wax?”. So you’ll find I’ve got little bits of white wax that are showing, and some areas are probably thicker than others, so you take some cloth, this is lint-free cloth, this is actually old sheeting, and then you just wipe over it. I’m not buffing it at this stage, no buffing just wiping off the excess.
So this leads us on to question three: “how long do you wait before you start waxing?”. So about an hour. Makes the whole thing’s dry and then you can start waxing.
So the next question I get asked is about buffing. I think there’s a confusion between wiping excess wax off and buffing. Buffing to me is where you’re getting a shine on it – that’s what I’m talking about. When i just wipe off the excess wax that’s it, it’s finished, I don’t need to do any more, but if I want to buff, ie get a shine,I’m going to leave that overnight let the wax dry, remember it’s an oil thing so the oil needs to dry off, let it dry overnight, next day come in and then start polishing. You can use a cloth or you can even use a brush. There are some polishing brushes, but don’t start doing it immediately because all you’re doing is wiping waxes around, oily wax. So the best thing to do is just start doing that. Now that’s not polishing, but if it was dry it would polish up beautifully.
So finally question number five. People say “I’ve waxed, my paintwork looked beautiful, then I waxed and now it’s all ruined. Everything looks terrible – it was the wax that did it!”. I’m afraid not. It was not the wax that did it. I’m afraid it was the paintwork underneath. So what is the solution? The solution is to leave it a couple of days and repaint and then re-wax, but when you paint do it really really evenly and don’t do that brush mark where you press hard.
So that’s the answer to the five frequently asked questions about Chalk Paint® Wax.
