Ebonizing Furniture Legs

We have an old farm table we are refinishing for our kitchen table. The top will be stained and finished. The legs and supports are in pretty bad shape. We want to paint them black so they will match our Hitchcock chairs. Do you know of a technique that we can use to apply the black paint so that it will look old? They are carved legs so we do not have a flat surface. I was thinking about painting and then wiping off?
Any ideas are appreciated.

Re:Ebonizing Furniture Legs
A really great way to do this is to stain the legs black. This is called ebonizing or making black. With a good penetrating black stain you'll get the black but at the same time you'll see any figure in the wood, and if you want to see some of the wood tone just lightly steel wool in the area you want to highlight.

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