Gold Dipped Pots with Homemade Burlap Runner

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I bought the supplies for this craft project 5 weeks ago and I finally got around to putting it together this weekend. Today I am going to share with you how I white washed 3 terra cotta pots, tipped them with gold, added succulents and then made a homemade burlap table runner to place them on. Whew! Its does sound like a lot of work, but I got all of this done in one afternoon… The result? A beautiful new table runner on my long rectangular coffee table and three golden pots with cute little succulents in them. I just love how it looks in my family room!

White-washed-pots
At first I thought I would paint the pots white and do the gold tipping the same way on each pot. B.o.r.i.n.g. I decided to white wash the pots, instead… To white wash them, I used a sponge brush and soaked it in water, then I tipped it into a little bit of white tempera paint and painted the pot. It doesn’t need to be perfect or even, the painting with water and tempera is a little messy and runny, but those streaks are what makes the paint interesting and translucent. You want to use more water than paint for this to work. After the paint dries (and, it will dry rather quickly!), you want to take a light grade of sand paper to it and scruff it a little here and there to rub off some of the white paint, this gives the pot a distressed look.

Adding-polka-dots
Next, I used green painters tape and marked off the sections on each pot that I did not want to get covered in gold spray paint. Hobby Lobby sells small spray cans for small projects like this one. For the pot with the gold polka dots, I used a round sponge applicator and dipped it in some gold spray paint that I had sprayed on a paint tray.

Glue
In the floral section, you can find green Styrofoam in different sizes and I found one that would fit inside the terracotta pot. I did use a knife to cut it in half since it was too wide. Then, I took a brush and lightly painted the top of the Styrofoam with glue.

Pot-with-gravel-on-top
I bought two different kinds of gravel (tiny gravel similar to sand) at Hobby Lobby in the model railroad section. I sprinkled this sandy gravel on top of the glue, patted it down and then dumped it upside down to get rid of any gravel that didn’t stick to the glue.

I then pressed the succulent stem into the Styrofoam and tada! I have my gold pot with succulent plant!

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And, here is how the 3 pots with succulents turned out… I love how ‘real’ the succulents look. I have never been able to keep a plant alive indoors (outdoors is another story!), so I am excited to have a little green that will stay alive in the house!

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Just a couple of close ups of the pots themselves. Isn’t the polka dot pot adorable? And, I love how ‘gold’ this spray paint I used looks!

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After making these beautiful pots, I decided they needed a long table runner for my coffee table. Since burlap is staring at you in every corner in Hobby Lobby, I decided to try my hand at a homemade burlap table runner. It was actually quite easy! You can see in this photo that I took one roll of burlap and cut 4 strips of burlap and then I used one roll of thinner burlap with white stripes painted on it and used it as an outside border. After I had all of the strips cut to the right size, I hot glued them all together by overlapping them a little.

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End result? This beautiful burlap table runner…