Stone-Look Vase Hack

A trend we are seeing a lot right now is the use of pieces of pottery/stoneware with an old-world feel. These pieces aren’t perfectly polished and the imperfections are part of the appeal. However if you aren’t bringing back authentic ancient relics from your frequent travels around the globe (me neither) then you either have to buy an expensive imitation or create your own.

I recently found a glass dish at a craft store and while I didn’t really care for the print on the glass, I really liked the shape. Best of all, it was part of their Spring collection and marked down 80%! This made it the perfect candidate to paint and age.

While I really like the idea of how easy it would be to use the stone-look spray paint, I wanted something that felt more organic and earthen rather than mass produced and uniform. I opted instead for the paint + baking soda technique.

I first spray painted the dish with a coat of spray paint in a concrete gray color. I wanted to give the paint/baking soda mixture something to adhere to and give the piece some depth in case it didn’t go on evenly.

Once this was dry I mixed a sample pot of gray paint I had leftover from a previous project with baking soda at a ratio of about 2:1 (paint : baking soda). I applied a fairly heavy coat to all surfaces. I used a wide brush to not leave obvious brush marks and to enhance the old world aesthetic.

After allowing the paint to dry thoroughly, I aged the dish with dry coffee grounds. Extra points if you use flavored coffee - a yummy smelling, antique looking dish! You can also use potting soil to age it. Simply rub the coffee grounds or the potting soil onto the paint and brush off the excess. This will make the pot or dish seem to have some patina but not appear dirty.

Now here’s where I went wrong. You see, I did this while I had the flu and well, logic wasn’t exactly my strong suit. So while I should have used clear matte spray paint to seal everything, I decided to use what I had on hand which was clear matte polycrylic. You know what you get when you mix coffee grounds and water? Coffee. You know what happens when you cover a pot in liquid coffee? It looks dirty. You know what happens when you put polycrylic over a dirty-looking pot? You have a permanently dirty coffee-covered pot.

So, in order to make the dish look like I had originally intended, I had the opportunity to start over. Luckily, this is such an easy process that it didn’t take long to redo. I repainted with a layer of the paint/baking soda combination and once it was dry I lightly aged the dish with some coffee. This time I made the more conscious decision to spray with clear matte spray paint.

Now I have a dish that is on trend and was very inexpensive to complete. On a 1-10 scale of difficulty this was maybe a 1.5. Just make sure you don’t have a fever and are able to use simple logic.