alisaburke

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Simply Magic

In my dreams we would live in a house with a big yard. But until that dream comes true, I am taking time to appreciate our tiny and humble townhouse with no yard :( but it does have a deck with a peek-a-boo view of the ocean and is a front row seat to fireworks over SeaWorld every night in the summer- this view is why we bought our home! Every single evening at 9:50 p.m. I take photos of the night sky exploding with color. I am not much of a fireworks person (they look the same to me) but I do LOVE playing with my camera, with aperture, shutter speed and focus to capture wild and abstract light trails. The results are simply magic and make me grateful for what we have right now :)

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Flower Pot Garden Urn

We have a number of home projects going on over here for the holiday weekend and I have been working on cleaning and organizing our patio garden. This year I decided to have less flowers and just focus my attention on an little herb garden. I wanted to plant my garden in a giant ceramic urn but when I shopped around and found that they were hundreds of dollars, I decided to figure out a way to make my own. Big surprise eh?!

I started by purchasing two large plastic flower pots one BIG- one a little bit smaller as you will see.

I decided on plastic because they are so much lighter than the clay pots.

I wanted to create a crackled background for my pot so I covered the entire surface in craft glue (this is a cheap way to crackle!) I used a light layer of glue mixed with just a little bit of water.

While the glue was still wet I painted a LIGHT layer of paint over the top- I used gray deck paint.

I let it dry completely and then the crackle appeared.

I went back over it again- same steps but this time I cracked it with white paint.

I wanted layers of different crackle.

Once all the crackle was dry I started painting my design all over the pot.

note- our patio is completely covered and is not exposed to any elements- not that there are many elements here in San Diego :) but if you are putting your pot outside I would recommend using clay pots with acrylic paint OR plastic pots with an oil based paint for outdoors or made for a plastic surface.

I was going for a weathered, blue and white sort of Moroccan inspired pot.

I painted...

and painted...

and painted some more (it took a long time) until the entire surface was covered.

I didn't want the blue to be bright so to create a more weathered, toned down and aged look, I mixed a milky mixture of white paint and water to glaze over the surface to tone down the blue.

You really could do all kinds of things with different colors of glaze to achieve different effects- I didn't because I was running out of patience from painting the pot!