Spring Succulent Sanctuary!

Hello, everyone! Who's ready for spring?  I know I am.  The weather has been gorgeous this week--but they say we're supposed to get snow on Sunday! In an effort to fight this Indian Winter, I bought myself a little jade plant to keep in the window by my desk.

(Not a photo of mine, but this is a jade plant.)

I've used some pretty creative things as planters over the years:

Like these dinosaur toys that I gutted and painted! Can you tell I like succulents?

So I knew I needed to give this new baby a nice home.

I have this terracotta pot (that I believe I stole from my mom a few years ago), but I'm not a huge fan of the pattern on the middle of it.

Since I knew anything I painted onto the pot would still show this pattern, I decided to cover it with paper instead!

If you've read some of my other posts, you know that covering ugly stuff with gorgeous handmade paper is one of my favorite techniques; it's quick, usually inexpensive, and--most importantly--easy!

I went next door and grabbed this pack of stunning monochromatic paper by Shizen.

And the process was simple enough:

I began by priming the whole pot (two layers on the rim and saucer) with Joe's Prime Really Good Gesso.

When that dried insanely quickly, I could put down my paint layer.

I painted the rim and saucer with my absolute favorite accent color, Golden's Iridescent Gold Deep (Fine). These are the parts I wasn't going to cover with paper.

When that was good and dry, I used Golden Soft Gel Medium (Gloss) to adhere the paper to the pot.

One sheet didn't quite wrap around it entirely, but because of how busy the pattern is, you'd hardly be able to tell I had to do any overlapping.

When the paper-covered everything, I trimmed it down to the bottom of the pot with an X-Acto Knife and glued the edges down with more gel medium.

With another coat of gel medium to seal the paper and paint, I was finished!

What a happy little jade!

And now it lives in the window, hopefully beckoning springtime and rebuking the snow!

There is soo much you can do to create one-of-a-kind planters, especially on these cheap little terracotta pots.