DIY Vintage Easter Peat Pots – Free Printables

I’ve been obsessing over Peat Pots lately! They are so promising of spring, both by appearance and fragrance, and I love the prim, worn look of them. Furthermore, they are really cheap to buy, and offer amazing texture for all sorts of artistic whimsies 😀

I must admit I have crafted more than a few of these for Easter, thinking I’ll gift some to friends and family too 🙂

These are the largest peat pots I could find locally. I would love to get even larger ones for more projects later, they’d make wonderful gift baskets for any season 😀

I was struggling with this project because I wanted to keep and enhance the rough textures. When I printed my graphics on plain paper it covered the texture totally. I then tried printing on tissue paper, but even that covered the texture and looked way to smooth… I was almost giving up on my initial idea, when I decided to try printing on paper towels:

The paper towels have the perfect texture for this project, actually adding even more roughness to the final look 😀

You know how I love easy projects, and usually tell you I spent 10 minutes or maybe 1 hour…? This is not one of those projects… 😛 Not because it is difficult at any point, but because there is a lot of ink, paint and glue involved that must have time to dry between operations…:-P

I have an ink jet printer: Canon Pixma MG 6150, and I need to take several precautions to be able to mod podge my images while minimizing the ink bleed. Your printer ink might cooperate better, and if so you can complete this project in a lot less time! In case your printer ink is also troublesome, try following my steps and see if that works for you too 🙂

Estimated time: 3-day project/weekend project (approx 2 hours per day).

Supplies: Peat pots, white acrylic paint, a roll of white kitchen paper towels, mod podge (decoupage medium), sealer or hair spray, 3-4 sheets of plain printer paper, strong coffe or tea, 7 cm polystyrene eggs, kleenex paper tissue, gesso, skewers. (Scissors NOT allowed on this project)

Tools: your printer, brushes for paint, gesso and mod podge, paper shredder

Instructions:

DAY 1

• Push your egg onto the pointed end of a skewer
• Crumble one layer of tissue paper hard together, then open it carefully, without removing the crinkles
• Mod podge the tissue paper onto the egg, you can use the skewer to hold it and avoid getting glue on your hands. The idea is to get a rough and textured surface, resembling paper maché.
• Set aside to dry in a vase or can, carefully so the eggs are not touching each other.
• (Because of the crinkled tissue paper, the mod podge will be very wet, thus need longer time to dry!)

• Stain your plain printer paper with coffee or tea
• Set aside to dry.

DAY 2

• Paint a layer of gesso over your eggs
• Set aside to dry (at least over night)

• Run your stained paper through a paper shredder. I have a darling little manual one, the kids love to hand crank paper sheets into those wonderful even curled strips.

• Paint your peat pots with a rough layer of white acrylic paint, I painted both the inside and outside. I used a very dry brush and carelessly painted a little here and there letting some of the pot show still. If your brush is too wet, the paint will not stay on the outside of the pot.
• Set aside to dry.

• Use a roll of good quality paper towels.
• Tear off one sheet, and bring out your ruler to take precise measurements (my paper towel sheets are 140mmX212mm)
• Create a custom sized paper in you printer settings and choose manual load
• Don’t separate the layers of you paper towel sheet before printing
• Print out the pages, I sat right next to the printer and fed only 1 paper towel sheet at the time, to avoid printer jam.
• On most pages I had small drops of spilt ink, but the more accurate you define your printer settings, and manage to feed the paper, the less spills.
• Let your sheets dry over night. (if not your ink will bleed when you start mod podging)

DAY 3

• Spray the graphics with some sealer, hair spray will do if you don’t have craft sealer on hand (to avoid bleeding)
• Carefully separate the layers of each paper towel sheet, you want only the top layer with the graphics on it
• Spray sealer on the back side of the graphics too (my sealer take about 5 mins to dry, hairspray even less)
• Tear out the graphics with a generous white border around each one (don’t cut them out or you will have the sharp edges on your finished project)
• Apply mod podge to the peat pot where you want to attach the graphics, and attach it with light finger pats.
• Work quickly here: apply mod podge over the image with a brush, I do the white edges first, then go from lightest to darkest colors.
• Rins your brush with water between each graphics!
• Repeat the process with the egg stamps.
• Shorten the skewer if your peat pots are small like mine, to about 10cm
• Lay a small handfull of shredded paper into the pot
• Tuck the egg-on-a-skewer in the shredded paper, the skewer will easily let you control how your egg sits on top of the paper.
• TA-DAH: Hard labor Easter Vintageness, but the end-result is greatly rewarding!!

        

Go to the folder below to download high quality printable files, and to check out the Easter graphics I posted last year:

These file are free for your personal use and enjoyment 🙂 The egg stamps are various transfer images from Karen at The Graphics Fairy. Karen also has the wonderful graphics I used to decoupage my little Easter Box, displayed with more thrifted finds; 2 figurines and a little star doily:

I have used the following sources for this project:

Egg Stamps – The Graphics Fairy

Easter Chicks in Egg Cart – The Graphics Fairy

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