Decorative Mouldings & Garden Furniture

When you think of WoodUbend decorative mouldings, upcycled furniture, crafting and even interior decor springs to mind. Did you know, that if properly sealed then WoodUbend can be used for external projects? Luckily, all Posh Chalk products can be used outside, so for your garden furniture projects, you don’t need to look any further than WoodUbend and Posh Chalk.

Some of you may remember a while back, we were joined by the very talented Wayne Perry, The TV Carpenter. Whilst he was visiting, Wayne helped create a candle holder using nothing but an old block of wood, some copper piping and, of course, WoodUbend and Posh Chalk. Take a look at our blog to learn how to make a candle holder with WoodUbend and Posh Chalk. Well, once again Wayne graced us with his presence and helped us create a very ornate piece of garden decor which would eventually find its way into his mother’s garden.

It’s always interesting when Wayne comes as we end up using our decorative mouldings on extremely innovative projects, this one would be no different. Wayne turned up with a great idea and some old barrel hoops – the kind which are found around old  whiskey barrels. We were going to create an armillary sphere inspired design. For those of you who don’t know, and I confess I didn’t know before this project, an armillary sphere is an old instrument used to represent the movement of celestial bodies around the earth. Who says we’re not scientific at WoodUbend?!

Before we’ve even considered decorative mouldings or Posh Chalk the whole sphere needed to be erected. On the face of it, this looked like quite a tricky job, but as Wayne demonstrated the reality is quite different. Interestingly, (if you find this sort of thing interesting) barrel hoops are cambered, if you think about the shape of a barrel it’s not straight up and down, rather it is thinner at the bottom and top than it is in the middle; as such the hoops are made on an angle so they sit right.

With this in mind, the first step was to arrange all the hoops correctly, so the smaller one sat in the middle with the bigger ones on the outside, then intersect the rings and create ‘pizza slices’ putting a little dot at each intersection. This dot marks where to drill through the metal.

I was dying to get cracking with the decorative mouldings but there was one or two small stages to get through first. Using a long metal bar, Wayne thread it through two sets of opposing holes, screwed on a decorative cake top and tightened it up with a nut at the bottom. We now had the top and bottom or our ornamental garden furniture.

Next up, we opened up our sphere, passed the largest hoop over the top, lined up the pre-drilled holes and joined the whole thing together with a rivet gun. Rivet guns are affordable and really easy to use, if you’re considering giving this garden ornament a go, check out our video at the end; Wayne gives out some great instructions on how to use a rivet gun.

Now it was WoodUbend’s time to shine, I didn’t want to overdo this project with decorative mouldings but I would be remiss if I didn’t manage to squeeze a few on somewhere. As Wayne still had his drill handy, we drilled a hole through the middle of the 1384 centrepiece design. Remember, WoodUbend decorative mouldings have all the properties of wood when they’re cool, so they can be drilled (as well as sanded, stained, distressed, painted, waxed etc).

With the hole through the top of the centrepiece moulding, we popped the decorative top off of the sphere and threaded the metal bar through the hole before screwing the topper back on. As the moulding was effectively screwed into place, we didn’t need any glue to stick this one down, just a bit of heat to mould it to the shape of the garden ornament.

Around the side I had planned to incorporate a handful of the smaller designs around the middle band. As both myself and Wayne were working on this project, we decided to create a little WoodUbend conveyor belt. Wayne would prepaint the decorative mouldings and I would heat them up and glue them to the surface.

As Posh Chalk products are flexible they can be used to pre-paint your WoodUbend mouldings before heating and bending. So, it was on with the Black Carbon Smooth Metallic Paste, even though the ornament would live outside, there was no need to seal the moulding afterwards; like the Patinas, the Posh Chalk Pastes are an all-in-one product.

Around the sides we incorporated the 2158 floral centrepieces and a 1458 lion centrepiece for good measure. These decorative mouldings were placed at each intersection. One of the fantastic things about WoodUbend is the fact that they can be adhered to any surface quickly and easily with the application of a little heat and some good quality wood glue.

Whether you’re applying to wood, leather, glass, stone, plastic the process remains the same, heat them, apply wood glue and press them onto the surface. If you’d like a little more information on WoodUbend, check out our handy guide.

I also wanted to incorporate one of our new release WoodUbend trims, TR700. This trim would be placed across all of the bands on the top half of the armillary sphere, as WoodUbend trims are all 2.1m long we had more than enough material with just the one trim. Although the premise remains the same when using the trims – heat apply, wood glue and press onto the surface – there are a few other points to keep in mind.

As the trims are long, when heated it is best to keep them in their coil. Keeping the trims in the coil ensures that the heat and therefore the flexibility is retained longer, but also you don’t have long, unruly lengths of WoodUbend everywhere; just uncoil what you need. Next up, it’s far easier to apply the wood glue to the surface you’re using, as opposed to the back of the trim. Learn more about the ins and outs of the WoodUbend trims.

Once the TR700 trim was on, it was time to break out the Posh Chalk Textured Paste, unlike the Smooth Metallic Pastes the Textured Pastes have real Swarovski Crystals in! I wanted this ornament to have an aged look and the Textured Pastes are perfect for mimicking the rough textured of a heavily weathered piece of metal.

With this in mind, I dug out my Black Graphite and Vintage Gold Textured Pastes, I was really aiming to dab them on to the metal hoops and decorative mouldings in quite an organic manner. As all of the mouldings had already been coated in the Black Carbon Smooth Paste, it was less about coverage and more about building up that texture.

Once the Textured Pastes had been sufficiently dabbed and dobbed onto the surface, it was time to bust out a bit of bling! I mixed up some of the Pale Gold Posh Chalk Pigments, again when mixed with the new-style Posh Chalk Infusor, the Pigments are more than at home outdoors. I was going for a little bit of a light touch with the Pigments, using them to highlight the texture which had been built up as well as the details of the decorative mouldings.

Now my Pigments were on, it was time to create some verdigris using the Green Fhthalo and Blue Prussian Metallic pastes, this time of the smooth variety. As all the pastes are water based, they can quite easily be mixed together, so that’s what I went right ahead and did – creating a lovely verdigris. Using my now perfect dabbing and dobbing technique I picked out bits of the design in the weathered green colour.

Once it was on the surface, I spritzed with my water bottle in order to thin the mixture out a little so it would run down the decorative mouldings, giving a truly organic weathered feel.

There she was, a garden ornament fit for royalty – or the mother of a TV carpenter!