Chalkboard Paint 1917

Over the last couple of years, chalkboard paint has boomed in popularity in the crafting community. There are chalkboard memo boards, chalkboard menus, chalkboard ornaments, chalkboard seating cards, chalkboard roosters, owls, horses and pigs. But what about before  Hobby Lobby, Michael’s, and JoAnn Fabrics stores all carried it? We still had chalkboards, right? Were they grown? Mined? Excavated from Egyptian tombs?

Here is how it was done:

Emery is a mineral mined from the Greek Islands, consisting mostly of aluminum oxide. It is used as an abrasive. Uses include polishing with emery cloth, filing fingernails with emery boards, and as stuffing in pincushions to keep pins sharp. In its most finely ground form, it is called emery flour.

Lampblack is soot collected from oil lamps and used as a colorant.

Glue from this era varied in uncountable ways, so for our purposes today, I have chosen one of the most basic forms:

Flour of emery is still available commercially. If you’d like a more authentic, rustic look to your chalkboard projects, you could start firing up some oil lamps over the next couple weeks in preparation for your next project – now that’s shabby chic!

Sources:

Ross, W.S. Secrets Revealed. San Francisco: W.S. Ross, 1917. Print.

Youman, Alexander E. A Dictionary of Every-Day Wants. New York: Frank M. Reed, 1872. Print.