Rusty Business

#1 of 3 in my series of coffee creamer upcycled bins.

Are you like us. . . . ?

 

Do you have a ton of these hanging around the house??  This is just the tip of the iceberg for us.  

 Why do we save them??

For one, I love the handles.   One on the left. . . .

. . . and another one on the right.  Makes it so easy to carry whatever you have stored in them, they're also very sturdy.
Hubby uses them to store his nuts and bolts and the like.  I use them to hold my markers, pens and paint brushes.  Obviously, I didn't like the original pictures and text and didn't know what to do until I recently ran into this blog:  How to-Paint Faux Rust by Colleen Jorgensen, a life saver in my opinion.  In Colleen's blog post, she was able to turn wood, plastic and cardboard paper into rusty items!  I was intrigued and had to continue reading and eventually I copied.  Here is my project:

This is the real stuff.  Fortunately I found it out in the garage, studied it and used it as a reference.

 So, to transform my plastic bins into rusty looking cans, I needed all this:

• RUST-OLEUM Rusty Metal PRIMER
• Acrylic Paints:
• Craft Smart Orange Spice
• Americana Terra Cotta
• Apple Barrel Yellow
• Apple Barrel White
• Apple Barrel Black

• KRYLON Matte Sealer
• Craft Smart Chalk Paint, Black
• One stencil sponge brush, size of a nickel
• One regular paint brush

Plus a jar of clean water and some paper towels.

 First, I spray painted the bin with the Rust-oleum Rusty Primer

Since I didn't have a sea sponge I used a stencil sponge brush for all the paint applications.  I then sprayed it with the Matte sealer.

This bin ended up being my favorite one of all the ones I painted.  Closest to it being realistic as I could get.

Once the sealer dried (in about 15 minutes) I took an extra step and added a square of chalk paint in the front.  The Folgers coffee bin again was my favorite, it has a grooved frame in the front to paint an almost perfect square, depending on how shaky your hand is.

I repeated the process with all the other bins.

Since the black chalk paint was still too fresh to write on, I super-imposed the lettering using PicMonkey.

Don't they look cool??  I am very happy with the turnout.  Thank you Colleen :)

Have a great weekend and remember to savor every moment!

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