Upcycled table - finished at last!

A while ago ..... nearly two years ago in fact .... some friends of ours bought a house and said if we wanted any of the 'junk' inside it, we were welcome to it :-)  There was a small table, with an awful peeling formica top, so I said I would take it away, do something with it and then give it back to them, all transformed.  I think they were happy about the first part, not so happy about getting it back ..... LOL.  The picture above, is the table after the removal of the formica and sanding down.

It may have taken a while for me to get around to it, but once I had started I remembered how I really like doing up furniture - I hadn't done any for years because our house is now, well, full!  So I have had a lot of fun with this table.  I started by turning it upside down and painting the base and legs with a cream oil eggshell paint, 3 coats, a day between each coat.  I should have used a primer first, then I would only have needed two coats of the eggshell.  Live and learn......
Then I started on the top.  Primer first, then a coat of emulsion in the same cream - a water-based paint rather than the oil-based, because of the finish I had in mind.  I wanted to cover the top in a Decopatch paper, cream with a gold crackle pattern.  Then ... disaster!  It looked awful and got worse as it dried - I have decopatched other projects with good results, but this just didn't work!  In the end, when it had dried, I decided it all had to come off, so I sprayed it with water and set to with a wallpaper scraper.  DS1 helped, bless him. 
I decided to do a proper crackle finish on the top, using acrylic paint and Paperartsy crackle glaze.  So I painted it with a coat of gold acrylic, allowed to dry, applied a coat of the glaze .... allowed to dry .... then painted over a cream acrylic.  The gold crackles appeared very fast and finally it started to look as though I might not have ruined it after all!  I also painted two wooden mouldings with the gold and adhered those onto the front and back using epoxy resin.

This is how it looks now, with a close up of the crackle effect:



I am very happy with it, if I only had the space I would keep it!  Can't wait to see the reaction when we hand it back........ :-)