Mother's Day Painted Pots With Flowers

It's 10am PST when I am posting this and as such the pots were just given to the Mom's at a Mini Class Concert. So, though these are for Mother's Day, I am not letting the cat out of the bag by posting early. Onto the post.

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My son's Kindergarten Teacher asked me to help her figure out a pot painting project for Mother's Day. I thought the idea of the kids painting a pot and giving it to their Mom with a flower in it was a great idea. I set to work.

Before you set out, know that this was a lot of work since we had 34 pots to do. One or two pots would be a breeze though.

First I priced up the supplies to see that we could do this for about $5 or less per person. We were on budget:

• $0.77 : small clay pot at Home Depot
• $9/32=$0.28 : gallon of deck paint reject at Home Depot, in a colour (off white) that would work
• $4/32=$0.13 : clear coat can of spray
• $13/32=$0.41 : soil for pots
• $1.69 : price per plant

Grand Total: $3.28

I got the pots (the teacher purchased the supplies with a discount and handed it all off to me) and started work. First I had to remove sticker glue from them all.

Sanding sticker glue off pots in prep for priming them for kindergarten project pic.twitter.com/KRNxmeNxIw
— Mark Thistle (@mthistle) April 26, 2014

Then I primed them all off-white.

Next we did the painting at school with the kids and then it was onto giving a clear coat of gloss paint.

Pots being clear coated

The final steps were to add the soil and plants. And voila!

Pots ready to go home with Mom's!

The kids had a blast doing this project and so did I. It was a lot to take on 34 pots and I learned a couple things I would change next time. Those being:

• Open up the reject paint first. If it is full of little bubbles stay away, far away. The deck paint had a ton of bubbles that would not go away while I used it. I had to sand that off-white finish on 34 pots for 2 (and in some cases 3) coats of paint.
• Clear coat spray does not react well with ink pens. The "dry" pen runs when sprayed and makes names on the bottom a mess. Due to this I also held off from using a black marker to add highlights for the bugs faces.