Garden Art Crafts
Garden art crafts not only allow you to adorn your backyard economically, but give you the opportunity to infuse your own personality into projects. Instead of purchasing higher priced and commercial items from a local garden center, you can give new life to old garden decorations and make some new ones using your favorite colors and style. Yard sales, flea markets and even your own trash bin are great places to find less than perfect or discarded items to use for your garden craft project. Does this Spark an idea?
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Refurbish Planters
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Gather your old garden planters or buy some faded ones from a local yard sale and refurbish them with faux painting techniques. Both plastic and terra cotta planters and flower boxes can be repainted after a simple cleaning. If your items are particularly porous, you may want to run some medium grade sand paper over the planter or flower box before painting. You can use a faux Verdigris painting technique to give the plant holders an aged copper look.
Weather Metal
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If you prefer a rustic look on your metal garden items give them a rusted antique look. Use a mixture of two tablespoons of table salt and enough hot water to fill a standard size spray bottle. The technique can be used on steel, tin or metal as a rust agent. There is no need to buy expensive decorative paints to give a rusted look when spraying the item daily for a few weeks and allowing it to sit in the sun will achieve the same appearance.
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Faux Rocks
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Adorn your garden or water feature area with faux rocks for a fraction of the price a visit to a garden center would require. You will us a Hypertufa recipe to make rocks which can weather the elements and layer it to at least three inches thick. A mold for the recipe mixture to form around can be build from chicken wire stuffed with plastic bags, Styrofoam or wood. Use a pointed trowel, sea sponge or real rocks to rub across the mixture when it is nearly dry to give it a realistic texture. After the faux rock cures, you can paint it and apply a concrete sealer to protect it from rain and snow.
Garden Spheres and Plastic Covering
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The Hypertufa recipe can also be used to make garden spheres or cover plastic garden items. To make a sphere you can use an inflatable beach ball or large plastic exercise ball as the form. You will need to buy a releasing agent from the hardware store to lather onto the ball before applying strips or hardware cloth and the recipe mixture. The process is very similar to doing paper Mache
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References
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