The Zelda Pots craft was more time consuming than I expected(it took more than a day with drying time), but it turned out so darn cute and required basically no real skills, just a little imagination…the hardest part was resisting the temptation to smash them for rupees!

Supplies

*A lot of dollar stores will actually carry the vases in shapes close enough to pull this off, so try there first!

Steps

Sanding

Once you’ve got the vase your first step is to sand the outside just a little. Glass is so smooth that paint has trouble gripping it. So you need to rough it up a little to make sure that the spray paint won’t just slide off. I just went over it little with a fine grit, until I could see little scratch marks in the glass. It’s important to do this step outside so that you don’t end up breathing in too much glass dust, which can be a little dangerous.

Apparently I forgot to grab a pic before I started sanding, but here’s what it looked like mostly buffed up:

The top was fully sanded, and towards the bottom you can see some spots I’d missed that I continued to work on after taking this photo. We probably spent 2hrs working on sanding these vases, but we were outside in the sun with a nice breeze and a glass of wine, so it went quickly…so quickly I was surprised to realize I’d managed to get a bit of a burn.

Spray Painting

Once they were sanded it was time to spray paint them. It took a few coats, and I was surprised at how much paint I ended up using….probably would have helped if I could have been more precise in my painting, I think the tarp ended up with more paint then the vases.

Painted Vase



Fish bowl style vase

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Collection of Vases

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Collection of Vases

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Collection of Vases

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Arrangement of 3

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While the pots were looking great at a distance I could see still see sun through some of the bottom spots and it was really hard getting the can at the right angle to hit the spot. My mom had an old toilet roll holder and that was super helpful. I put the pots on it to hold them upside down and voila! I finally had easy access to the bare spots.

One last tip for this part…If you layer the paint on these too thick the paint loses the stone texture, but if you do a light layer every fifteen minutes they’ll come out looking fantastic. This was the part of the craft that took the longest, about 4 hours. Maybe it would have gone faster if I was out every fifteen rather than trying to watch a movie inside while it dried enough for the next layer.

Once you’ve got the paint layered on as thick as you like you’re going to want to allow it to fully dry. We took them in the house and left them on a shelf covered by an old sheet for protection for a few days.

Acrylic Paints

Once the spray paint was done drying I used a pointed round paint brush to draw the black line in a ring around the lip of the pot with black paint. Then I dipped the edge of a small foam brush in white paint and used it to draw a a zig zag line around the part of the pot that portruded back out. Acrylic paint is nice because it’s forgiving. As long as the spray paint is fully dried if you screw up you have a few minutes in which you can rinse the paint off of it with a little water. This allows you to redraw the line if you end up not likely the look, or squish the brush down too much.

Once the lines are drawn you just have to wait for them to dry, and voila! Pots complete! <3

Things I Could Have Done Differently

I do wish that I had picked softer colors rather than stark black and white, they popped so hard and I feel like they blended in a little more in the game. I think the pots may have looked better(and been more true to Ocarina of Time) if I had used more of a cream/charcoal combination.

Featured Image at top of the page by Naomi Leu

Final Image of the post by Ashley Dunn