Everyday Celebrating: DIY: Spray painting trees

Have you entered my giveaway for a beautiful holiday return address stamp? Go back and enter! Beautiful presentation for your holiday cards!

_______________________________________

So in prepping for my Candy Cane Christmas theme, I started looking around for striped items or items that could be re-purposed for this theme. Goodwill always has several small tabletop trees and I usually get a couple of them for various areas of my home. But this year, I wondered if I could stripe a tree by spray painting it.

What's the worst than can happen? Disaster, right? Well, that's fine because I bought the tree at Goodwill. It was inexpensive, I helped a great cause AND they had several so I can go back and get another without much money lost.

Here's the tree:

It's a bit over a foot tall.

This was a dense little tree and I thought initially that it would be difficult to get to all areas of the branches.

So I decided to do 3 chunks of colors and started painting the bottom section. I wrapped a plastic bag over the areas I didn't want painted.

For this project, I'm using Valspar for Plastics. The tree branches and needles are plastic and I didn't want to risk them melting. LOL

Above was the first coat. I was surprised that this paint covered really well the first coat. Even on thick branches such as these. Also, you'll notice that I painted some of the burlap bulb which was fine. I planned on covering that up as you'll see later.

While the red dried, I painted a few other things (hello faux candy canes!) I was surprised. It didn't take long at all to dry. Which was thrilling to me as it allowed me to move quickly to the next section, which would be white. For this section, I covered the red section in bags. I rolled up two more bags and shoved them in as a drop cloth.

I forgot to take a photo, but I also put a bag over the top section that would be red. So you're only left with the middle section available to paint.

I had this candle holder that I also purchased at Goodwill some time ago. Come to find out, it was the perfect size for the burlap bulb! Don't you love when that happens??

Added some ribbon...

And.... here she is....

She's not decorated yet, but boy, I love it! Fits in perfectly with my candy cane Christmas!

Don't worry, I'll post again when she's completely decorated!

Other uses.... perfect GIFT for a sports fan. Paint the tree in your fave teams colors! This one could be for Alabama fans... Ohio State... etc.

One last note: You will be using a LOT of spray paint to cover this tree. Not more then one can of each color, but you'll be adding layers of paint to cover all branches. This means the tree will have some serious fumes. Make sure you leave the tree outside for a bit to air out before bringing it inside.