Painting My Terracotta Pots

About two weeks ago, I was quite stressed and unhappy about work and life in general, and I had been for a little bit. So my boyfriend Josh & best friend Emily coincidentally on the same day (without knowing) both bought me flowers. In fact they were both orchids that were in soil. One yellow and the other pink. Both incredibly lovely.





I was pretty happy, I had been looking to buy a cute plant to go in my room for a while and now I had two! Troubling. They came in terribly ugly pink hessian sack type pots that were just tragic. But never fear my second job now is at a hardware store and I actually work in the outdoor, plant & garden part sometimes so I had quite a bit of time to browse for some pots & accessories. There were many many pots to choose from but I decided I'd rather do this on a budget so I chose terracotta pots that were $1.50 each and saucers that were $2.50. (why even were they dearer?)

Courtesy of Bunnings Warehouse

Not included in the image are the 2 pack of pot filters, which were about $3.00.
So overall the supplies only cost around $30 for everything.

I was pretty excited to start painting my pots. I finally had a day off to do it.

Supplies 

I started off by spraying the insides of my pots and saucers with a thick coat of clear lacquer. The coat of lacquer helps to seal and waterproof the inside of the pot so that when the outside is painted, and then used as a proper pot, water doesn't seep through the terracotta and destroy the paint.

I sprayed them good, then waited half an hour before giving the inside another coat.
Waiting for them to dry was making me impatient, so I started spray painting various things I could find, light blue.. (a box and a mini fake plant's pot)

The lacquer was finally dry so I flipped my pots upside down and started spraying.

Yes for some reason I thought oh man I don't need to prime this terracotta pot I can just spray it. Oh no no no. Luckily enough I still had a pot of primer from when I painted the backing of my bookshelf.

I got out the pot of primer and started painting the other un-destroyed pot while my handy assistant (Josh) wiped as much paint as possible off of that one so that I could try and prime that one when it was dry.

Primer is my one true love - that i always forget about (sorry)

Crisis averted!

featuring two lids that I decided to also prime + spray

Yawn. More waiting. Much longer this time so that the blue paint wouldn't mix in with the white primer.

6 hours later:

wow so fancy

More waiting, more spraying, waiting for drying again. I watched some tv shows in between.
Final touch ups annnnd done!

Okay so I did some research on orchids and apparently I'm not suppose to repot them until their flowers fall off and they're in the process of growing some new stuff. So the official potting of the orchids will have to wait. But for now, they look super pretty in their blue pots!

The yellow one was from Josh + the pink from Emily

I'm so happy with how they turned out and really pleased with the colour I chose as well! xx

BONUS: Instagram shot of baby plant on my bedside table.