A Couple Carafes Of Note

I know, I know, you’re saying, “Hey, man, you’ve got a Handicrafts category here, and you haven’t posted anything in over a year! What’s the deal? Are you not doing craft stuff any more?” Well, gentle reader, I know you’re not coming here for the copious book reports. Indeed, you must be seeking the crazy craft projects. Rest assured, although I spent most of the spring and summer painting the fence around my yard and look forward to completing that project in 2017, I have spent a little time this autumn doing stuff at my workbench to fill up that handicraft blog category.

The first things I did were a couple of coffee carafes into flower pots.

This is an old metal carafe I found at a garage sale for something like a quarter. It had a metal handle (with plastic grip) originally held in place by two rivets, but one rivet was gone. I took the handle off, primed the metal, and put a grey acrylic paint base on it. My beautiful wife had given me some old nail polish to use as paints, and I tried to do a flower on it. I tried using a rose template, but the nail polish bled beneath the edges of the template, blurring the image, so I repainted the grey base over it and tried freehanding some flowers. Of course, my freehand was awful, so I repainted the grey base on it and just put horizontal streaks in the various colors of the nail polish. Then I topped it off with some blue and white flowers since if I tried any sort of red flowers, I’d have clashed or something. I bought the flowers at Michael’s crafts instead of using ones I had on hand because the bin in the garage has piles of junk in front of it, and I’m lazy.

Cost:

$  .25 Carafe
  0.00 Acrylic paint (on hand)
  0.00 Nail Polish
 15.00 Flowers
  0.00 Flower foam (on hand)
--------
$ 15.25.00 total

I feel like I’m getting away with something because I’m counting things I bought in the past and never used as “free.”

The second carafe:

This is a drip coffee carafe that I bought at a garage sale for a quarter. I’d hoped to remove the cup numbers from the side and simply paint some stained glass colors onto it and put LED lights into it to shine through the paint, but when I couldn’t get the numbers off, I decided to paint a tree in acrylic to cover them and then some leaves, grass, and sky. Unfortunately, when I wiped the carafe with alcohol to prepare for the stained glass paints, I found it was washing the acrylic off, too. So I repainted the tree, and after I finished the other stained glass paints, I painted a clear with glitter over the tree. Hopefully, this will create a barrier so it can be dusted without damage. After everything dried, I put in some tree-like fake flowers and wound a small, battery operated strand of LED lights around the base of the fake plants.

I am not 100% pleased with it. The blue of the sky is much darker than the leaves and the grass, and the LEDs don’t shine that brightly through it. I might get a small rope light to put in it, or I might get a longer strand of lights with a cord to see how that looks.

Still, not too bad.

Cost:

$  .25 Carafe
  0.00 Acrylic paint (on hand)
 15.00 Stained glass paints (although I had some on hand, I wanted fresh stuff for this project
                             --also, I needed the little spoon for application)
  6.00 Plastic plant stems
  0.00 Flower foam (on hand)
  6.00 Lights (on hand, but I'm charging myself for them)
--------
$ 27.25 total

Clearly, I’m never going to make my money back on Etsy so long as I have to buy plastic flowers. Maybe I should clear a path to the bin of plastic flowers I’ve bought at garage sales over the years.

I’m fresh out of coffee carafes, and it’s not garage sale season, so I’ll have to move onto something else. I’m eager to work with the stained glass paints again as I have a bunch of them now.

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