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Where Artistry Begins
The Venetian plaster tools you actually need fit in one bag: a stainless steel Venetian trowel with rounded corners, a couple of stainless spatulas, a hawk, a mixing paddle, a set of sanding pads, a soft cloth for wax and the usual masking and PPE. Everything else is a refinement. This is the plastering kit we work with on site and hand to students on the first morning of the Beginner course, with notes on what to buy first, what to skip and how to keep the steel in good order.
This is the one tool that matters. A Venetian trowel is a flexible stainless blade with rounded corners, fixed to a handle with a slight spring in it. It is not the same thing as the plastering trowels sold for skimming. A standard plasterboard trowel is long, stiff and square-cornered, built to flatten gypsum in one thick pass; on a lime coat a fraction of a millimetre thick, the corners dig lines that you will spend the next hour trying to lose, and the blade will not flex enough to compress or burnish. Stainless is essential too, because ordinary carbon steel leaves rust-coloured marks in lime, which is alkaline and wet.
Sizes run roughly from 120mm to 280mm long. A 200mm or 240mm blade is the everyday size for walls. A small 120mm or 140mm is for reveals, behind pipes and the awkward corners of a bathroom. If you buy one trowel, buy the 240mm. If you buy two, add the small one.
Good trowels are ground thinner towards the edges so they flex evenly. Cheap ones are stamped flat and feel dead in the hand. You can feel the difference in thirty seconds, which is why we let students try both.
Stainless spatulas in 60mm, 80mm and 100mm widths. These load material onto the trowel, clean the edges, fill chips and lay small areas where a trowel will not reach. They cost very little and get used constantly.
A hawk holds the material at arm level so you are not bending to a bucket every twenty seconds. For thin polished coats some plasterers load straight from a small tub, but for base coats and textured lime a hawk is faster and cleaner. Aluminium is light and kinder to the wrist over a full day.
Lime plaster arrives ready to use but it settles in the tub. A helical paddle on a slow-speed drill brings it back in a couple of minutes. Do not whip air into it; a slow, steady mix to the bottom of the tub is the aim. We tint every tub by machine before it leaves us, so mixing on site is about consistency, not colour.
Most polished finishes are burnished with the trowel and not sanded at all. Textured finishes and some Marmorino work are sanded lightly between coats to knock off high points, and a final fine sand can lift a soft sheen before wax. Marmorino tools are otherwise the same steel; the material is coarser, not the kit. Keep 120, 240 and 400 grit foam-backed pads and a 600 or higher for a delicate final pass. Use them dry, use them lightly, and vacuum the dust off before the next coat. Over-sanding is one reason Marmorino can look tired or crazed; we cover the others in why Marmorino cracks.
Burnishing is done with the same stainless trowel, held almost flat and pushed hard across the surface as the last coat firms up. Some plasterers keep a separate, older trowel for this so a nick on the working edge cannot scratch the finish.
Wax goes on thin with a lint-free cotton cloth or a soft sponge pad, and is buffed with a second clean cloth once it has hazed. Old cotton T-shirts work. Anything that sheds fibres does not. Natural beeswax at £19 is the traditional finish for a polished lime wall; it deepens the colour, adds a warm sheen and gives a wipeable surface. For bathrooms and kitchens, a sealer at £25 is applied with a brush or roller before or instead of wax.
The finish only ever looks as good as the wall underneath it. You need a scraper and a sanding block, a filling knife, a bucket and sponge, and a roller or brush for primer. Our primer at £10 is a quartz-loaded bonding coat that gives lime something to grip, and it is the step people skip on their first wall and then wonder why the plaster slid.
Masking is low-tack tape for the edges and polythene for the floor. Lime is alkaline and will mark a wooden floor if it sits, so wipe spills straight away.
Wet lime is caustic. Nitrile gloves, safety glasses and a dust mask for sanding are the minimum. Long sleeves stop drips drying on your forearms.
If money is tight, this is the polished plaster tools list in the order to buy it:
The whole list of plaster tools can come in under the price of a tub of plaster. Add the small trowel as jobs come in.
Plastic spreaders sold with effect paints are too soft to compress lime and will not burnish. Notched trowels are for tile adhesive. Trowel sets with six sizes look tempting but you will use two. Electric polishers are for very large floors, not for beginners. And do not buy carbon steel because it is cheaper; it will rust and stain your first wall.
Rinse the trowel in clean water every time you put it down for more than a few minutes, and wash it before lime dries on it; dried lime is hard and scraping it off nicks the edge. Dry the blade and run a fingertip along it. A burr or a nick will scratch a polished coat, so dress it lightly with a fine stone or wet-and-dry paper. A trowel treated like this lasts for years and improves as the edge wears in.
A list of tools tells you what to hold, not the angle, the pressure or the moment a coat is ready to burnish. That is what the three-day Beginner course at the Zavoré Academy in Birmingham is for. Every tool on this page is on the bench, used on the same Italian plaster we sell and install, and you leave knowing which ones suit your hand. We describe a typical three days in inside the Beginner course.
A stainless Venetian trowel, two or three stainless spatulas, a hawk, a mixing paddle, foam sanding pads, lint-free cloths for wax, a roller for primer, masking and PPE. That is the whole kit; everything else is a refinement.
A flexible stainless steel Venetian trowel with rounded corners, usually 200mm or 240mm for walls and 120mm for reveals. The flex lets it compress thin coats and burnish the last one, and the rounded corners stop it scoring the surface.
Not well. A plasterboard trowel is stiff, square-cornered and often carbon steel: it scores lines into a thin lime coat, will not flex enough to burnish and can leave rust marks. A rounded stainless Venetian trowel costs little more and saves the wall.
A boxed starter set, usually one or two Venetian trowels, a few spatulas and sometimes a hawk and sanding pads, sold for polished plaster and Marmorino. A good one is worth buying; check that the steel is stainless and the corners are rounded, and ignore sets padded out with sizes you will never use.
Where to go next: if you would like to learn the tools in your hands rather than on a page, the Beginner course runs regularly in Birmingham and includes everything you need on the bench. For materials to go with your kit, the shop has primers, plasters, waxes and sealers, all tinted to your colour.
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