Crafters Corner : Playing with Plaid..Its snowing part 2

Good morning!

Rupa here with my first post for December! Yes…its December…month of festivities, holidays and the countdown to welcoming the New Year.

Today, I would like to show you a step by step to making a Christmas décor project using Folk art paints and texture paints from PLAID.

My recycle elements for this project are these humble, ordinary looking Hajmola bottles!

Let’s move on the process to see how easily I managed to work on these with some paints and textures to create a décor item.

Step1- Once the bottles were cleaned and the labels removed, I gave a coat of white gesso to all the bottles. I was looking for some matt pastel shades to go on the bottle and I dint have those colors of chalk paints with me! No worries…I made my own customized chalk paints with the Folk artMulti surface paints that I had.

TIP: Mix a bit of acrylic paint/folk art paint to a spoon full of gesso and you get some amazing chalk paint finish paints. But this can be done for small projects only!

I colored the 3 bottles in 3 different colors using the above technique and as the bottles were drying, I started working on the lids.

Step2- For the lids, I took some air dry clay and wrapped the lid with it to form tiny hats and let them dry overnight. I had some little Christmas print outs in my stash and adhered them to the bottle using modgepodge.

These were just 2 inches in height, just perfect fit on the bottle. I inked them with archival brown ink before sticking.

Step3- I applied one step crackle paint to the bottles and let them take its own course to dry. Once the cracks appeared, I applied some burnt umber acrylics and then rubbed it with a wet wipe. This way the cracks got filled up with brown paint and voila!

The bottles had vintage look. I gave them a coat of Folk art home décor Varnish and they were good to go.

By now, the caps had dried and I painted them in different colors. For one I had snow dripping on it using the Folk art texture paint(snow white). I for one, love this texture finish and have had it as a feature in all my Christmas projects. It’s probably the easiest way to give snow effects, just so REAL! I had a little bit of it on the snowy image on the bottle too.

Step4- I wanted each bottle to have a different element and so for the other, I had some moss dripping on the lids. Here again the Folk artpainted finishes came to my rescue. It’s just so dimensional you can actually feel the mossy texture. I also had the same poured onto a wooden disc that I intend using as a deco platter later in the project.

You can actually see that I have used just a stirrer to pour out the texture paint on to the disc as I wait for it to dry, you can see the dimension later.

Step5- I started to add some embellishments to the lids from my stash again. I stamped some music notes onto plain paper and distressed it with vintage photo DI and then stuck it to an empty cereal box and cut out the alphabets “JOY”.

I have layered 3 cartons to get a chipboard feel to the alphabets and inked that too with brown archival int. I then heat embossed some gold on to edges of the alphabets and stuck them to the lids with hot glue gun. All of them have snow dripping on them too!

Here is a look at all the caps. I tucked in some coconut coir and some red pollens for the “J” cap.

For the “O” I liked the overload of snow on the caps on the rims!

The “Y” cap had some moss and green foliage.

Step5- The bottles were ready to hit the final spot for decoration! I dressed up a wooden disc with glass crystals and placed all the bottles on it.

The rims of the disc are covered with moss and snow. I also kept some pine cones and foliage dipped is snow as additional embellishments. Here is the final look captured in different moods and locations.