Watercolor Votives

This little project is brought to you by Pinterest. 

Or my love of Pinterest at least! 

Do you like Pinterest as much as I do?  I used to (admittedly) get overwhelmed by it.  And I admit, sometimes it's a bit much to read "1,000 ways to play with your toddler without turning on the tv", lol.  But, I would say for the most part I'm a huge Pinterest fan.  Part of the reason is because I actually do the ideas I find there!  

Like this one.  I found the idea for watercolor votives here. And since I'm pretty much obsessed with anything paint related lately I thought I'd give them a try.  Here's what you should know. I like the examples better than mine, but that didn't stop me from making and appreciating mine. So, if you're worrying about your idea looking like the Pinterest example, just stop. It probably isn't going to! Sometimes you might like your project better, sometimes less.  I think you should make anyway.  You just might surprise yourself with what beautiful thing you can create when you put your mind, heart, eyes, and hands to it! 

I started with the glass votives above, which I've had in my pantry for months and months.  My method for painting them was fast and quick because I worked on this while the girls napped.  In a way that's good because it meant very little time to worry or stress about "doing it right."  I mixed regular acrylic paint with water to get the consistency I wanted.  I'm wondering if you could also do this with watercolors, if they weren't too light?  You should try it and let me know!

I dipped my brush in the paint and then dabbed it onto the insides of the votives, while holding the votive upside down.  So the paint slowly ran down the sides.  At first I had a beautiful yellow/green color going on that I loved but then I wanted to try to add some more color with the pink.  When I did that they kind of turned all pink.  And these were for date night! Whoops...

Brett gets sideswiped with pink. Again. 

In the daylight these looked gorgeous with a mini candle inside.  

At night I put a red pillar candle in one, and gold in another (plus the mini candle you saw above).  I would definitely recommend using a plain white, smaller candle for these because the pillar candles showed their colors through the votive, instead of the paint. 

Overall I was pretty pleased with this project though!  I think I'll give it another try with some smaller votives next time.  These vases would look fabulous with a bunch of handcrafted paper flowers inside! 

What's been your latest Pinterest project?

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