St. Patrick's Day Mantle Reveal

I have had a request from one of my very most faithful readers (hi Mom!) to get on with it and reveal my St. Patrick's Day mantle decor.  So even though I wasn't quite ready to do so - I still have one more St. Patrick's Day project in the workings - I will go ahead and do the mantle show and tell today.  I think she just wants to copy my mantle onto hers because she knows that mine will be so spectacular.  That other project wasn't going to be a part of the mantle display anyway, so I'll save that one for another post another day.

But first I must show you how I put together several of the pieces.  I decided to be a good girl and do some reusing, recycling, and repurposing.  Those seem to be the buzzwords these days, and now I'm even doing them.  Oh yes, I've been recycling my newspapers, cans and glass for years, but I've never really consciously repurposed anything.

So I decided to go down into my scary and messy and out of control with too many boxes of stuff and things that I don't know where else to put  basement and gather several of the bazillions of floral vases I have received and saved from over the last several decades.

I had read somewhere that if you are not ever again going to use a glass vessel for food or flowers, you can easily paint the inside and make it decorative and useful.  At least more useful than sitting endlessly on a basement shelf forever and forever and collecting dust.

So I decided to try it.  I went to my local Wal-mart and bought several two ounce bottles of acrylic craft paint in various green colors and a foam brush.  I think the paint only cost 57 cents a bottle.

I put a large blob of paint on the brush and started slopping it into the vase.  I quickly learned that my brush handle wasn't long enough to get the pain down into the bottom of some of my taller vases, and so I improvised by rubber banding a ruler onto the brush handle.

At times I literally just squirt the paint into the vase and turned the vase to help the paint to run and fully cover the inside.

It was a fairy simple process and in just about a half hour I had painted half a dozen vases of various sizes.  Certainly they are not perfect, but at a glance from a distance they look fine.  I'm very happy with how they turned out.

I still had one more idea that I wanted to create for my mantle - I wanted a banner.  I had some fabric scraps left from my St. Patrick's Day front door rag wreath which I had made earlier, and you can learn to do in this blog post.

I made myself a triangular pattern out of a scrap piece of cardstock and cut one flag out of each piece of leftover material.  Next I used my trusty glue gun and glued the top edges over a length of twine.  Finally I added a sparkly shamrock sticker to each flag.  Very simple.  I like simple.  Voila!

So here you go everyone - here is the Official Reveal of the St. Patrick's Day Mantle at my home:

A few store bought decorations, half a dozen repurposed vases, a washi tape lucky clover (read how to make it here), and a colorful banner.  Fun making the stuff, and fun looking at it.

Now, bring on those leprechauns.  I'm ready.