Birch Bark Vase

For today’s craft tutorial, I’m going to show you how to make a birch bark vase. This thing  is a little bit of everything I love: elegant, quick, simple, cheap, and easy! Perfect!

I love birch trees; they’re elegant, simple,  and the grey/white/brown colors are just gorgeous. So when I saw a gorgeous painted birch bark vase at Turtles And Tails I knew I had to try to recreate it!

Painted Birch Bark Vase

You only need three things for this project:

• a glass cylinder vase, about 10″-12″ tall
• rubber bands
• white spray paint

Start by adding rubber bands to your vase at random intervals. The beauty of this craft is that there is no right or wrong way to add the rubber bands. Just put them on there! Do make sure all the bands are flat against the vase with no twists, otherwise the paint will seep under and ruin your lines. I’d suggest using about 12 or so on a 10″-12″ tall vase. I overlapped a few of them and left a few of them separate because the lines on a birch tree aren’t uniform.

Once you have your rubber bands situated, give the vase a few light coats of white spray paint. I ended up doing two coats with about half an hour in between them.

Spray Paint Tip: I don’t know how I didn’t figure this out earlier, but if you put your project on a plain sheet of paper, you’ll be able to rotate it to spray all sides of your project without touching it and messing up the wet paint!

Remove the rubber bands once the paint is completely dry, and you’re done!

If you’re a bit heavy-handed when you spray paint (**ahem** not me, at all!), you may see some ridges of paint when you remove the rubber bands. That’s ok,  just pretend you did it on purpose to give your “tree” some texture! Or if you want the ridges to go away, get some very fine grit sand paper and lightly sand it down. You can also use sand paper to clean up any messy edges where paint may have seeped under the rubber bands.

Fill it with some fun flowers, or weird bead decor things, and you’re done! Or stick a candle in it. The lines look way cool with a lit flame inside!

What other cool ways have you seen to use spray paint for decorating? I used some gold spray paint on the beer bottle I used for my fall decor earlier this year. Which I guess counts as a vase. Sort of.

JonMarke brought home a giant branch-thing that had been spray painted silver. I haven’t used it for decorating yet, but I will! And in the meantime it makes an awesome photo prop. You can see it in the pictures I took of the paper curl ornaments, and in the background of the tin can snowman photo too.

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Jessi Wohlwend

Hi! I'm Jessi, the blogger behind Practically Functional, a blog about simple and practical ways to love your home, no matter where you live! We love every single square foot of our little home, and you can love yours too! Make sure you follow along by RSS or subscribe by email so you don't miss anything!

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