Gapitan World: Guest Post: Patriotic Canister

Monday, July 2, 2012

Guest Post: Patriotic Canister

I happen to be horrible at all things 4th of July. Like seriously. Once I made matching t shirts for my sister and I to wear to watch the fireworks. I actually still have mine. That's the extent of my patriotic craftiness.

So well I'm on vacation enjoying this heat (and the air conditioning!) I decided to bring in a 4th of July pro and an awesome blogger...
Here she is!

Hello Chica es Artistica fans! I'm Danni from Silo Hill Farm. My blog is mostly about making crafts that are quick, easy and inexpensive. Many of them can be easily taken apart and reused for another project on another day.

I'm thrilled to be guest posting for Margaret here today! She's one of the bloggers I admire most.....so much in fact that I wrote a whole post about her and if you missed it, you can read about it HERE, but you guys already know how awesome she is!

Today I'm going to show you a fairly quick and really easy project I made out of a cookie tin. I love these cookies:

source

Recently, after finishing off a can of them (I may or may not have had a little help!), I figured instead of throwing that can away, I could probably make something out of it. I have a lot of patriotic decor. I l-o-v-e the 4th of July! I figured I could make a patriotic canister out of this tin and after the 4th, use it to store some of my smaller red, white and blue stuff in.

I have some Washi tape that I picked up at Target. It was $4 for 4 rolls, which means it was about a dollar per roll. Super affordable.

I spray painted my can with just some basic white primer. I like primer, it covers really well and dries like a flat paint. After it was dry, I gathered up a my Washi tape, a stencil, a blue marker and a really cool adhesive temporary tattoo that I found on clearance after the 4th of July last year.

Obviously, everyone might not have snapped up one of those cool tats, but you could use buttons or jewels or whatever you have on hand! I decorated the top first, because I have no patience and I really wanted to see what that jewelled tattoo would look like on the lid. I also cut a strip of the red dotted tape in half and put it around the base of the lid.

This was enough inspiration to keep me going!

I put some more of the Washi tape around my canister in kind of a random pattern, leaving an open space in the middle.

Then, I grabbed a stencil that had some numbers on it and, because I really stink at stencilling, I traced the numbers on first with a pencil.

Then I took my blue Crayola washable marker and just filled it in.

I thought about putting "USA" on it, but went with the numbers instead.

Whaddayuh think?? It's not only fun and patriotic, it's functional as well! If you don't have Washi tape for the stripes, you could just tape them off with masking tape or painters tape and paint them on. I even thought about using fabric for the stripes, but finally just settled on the tape. I put it up on my mantel with some of my other patriotic decor.