On Friday September 9th, I was out driving and saw a sign for a garage sale. Its hard for me to say no to just checking it out. I decided I'll look in the rare case that they might have cheap paper, crafting, or bead supplies. Ideally I want to buy my supplies for my Etsy shop at Goodwill, thrift stores, or garage sales, or maybe the clearance sections (with coupons) at Hobby Lobby or Michaels. I'm trying really hard to be thrifty!
So I popped into a garage sale and I found this fall basket, it was only $1.00 and it looked nicely made and my Mom has these pretty fall flowers she loves, I thought it would look nice to hang up in the kitchen perhaps. So I grabbed it. I also bought a XL Men's striped polo because I thought it was black, its actually blue. So now its going to the boyfriend. I was going to use it for one of my purse remakes.
I decided the painted parts were too blah for my tastes. The pumpkin wasn't even orange, and the whole thing had an old/pale/sun lightened look, but very unflattering. So I whipped out my acrylic paints and some paper towels to try a "stained" not brush painted look.
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| BEFORE plus my paint supplies |
Ingredients:
Basket to paint
Similar acrylic or craft paint colors (or new colors if you want to paint the plain sections)
Paper Towels to use to apply paint
Process:
1. I gathered my supplies and my craft paints were almost perfectly matched to the paint choices already used. So basically I was just looking to brighten up the basket.
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| Using Paper Towels to apply the paint "stain" |
2. I used paper towels to "stain" the basket weave. It was harder than I thought. And very messy. The orange stripe at the top was easiest, but the weaves were quite tough! It was very hard not to get it everywhere else.
3. I ended up tearing up small slivers of paper towel, and rolling them up to small tips. This worked best for the weave. It was trial and error really! The smaller the tip, the easier to was to get close to the edge, without touching other weaves. When wet, paint was much brighter. But I only wanted a touch more color, so I thought it looked really good. If you want more, you can obviously add a few more coats. Wait til it dries in between to check your color.
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| Squirt paper to a surface and dip your rolled Paper Towel. |
4. Once you're finished just wait til its all dry before grabbing your flowers and hanging on the wall! Ideally you'd use a cup holder hook, but for how I only have a nail, and its just barely holding on!
What do you think? For only $1.00 and some flowers we already had, I think it looks pretty good!
