Hand Painted Wooden Spoons

I totally got the idea to paint wooden spoons from Pinterest. However, per my usual craft behavior, I failed to read tutorials in any great detail before beginning the project. I will have to get back to you on how the paint holds up to normal use, but for now we will settle for how I painted my spoons.

Edit 1/15/2014: According to my sister-in-law, her paint (spiral aqua) has held up to both hand-washing and a run through the dishwasher. Yay!

Side note: I actually painted six spoons total. As you will notice, I only have two pictured. This is because I didn't remember to take pictures of the four that I did for my sister Rebekah. She lives about 45 seconds down the road from me, but I can never remember to pull the spoons out while I am at her house. 

This project was very easy, but you need a lot of time for layering the paint and then waiting for the paint to dry. I used Martha Stewart craft paint and was very pleased with the colors and shimmery quality of the paint. However, I did test out the cheap off brand at Michaels first. I am sure that paint performs well in certain circumstances, but this project is not one of them. It was way too chalky and went on very clumpy. I bought the spoons at TJ Maxx - 6 for $6.

I selected a bronze shade for the base coat that actually turned into about 5 base coats. The paint color was too close to the spoon color for one coat to be sufficient. I just painted the top portion of the handle bronze and figured I would do the designs in other colors on top. I freehanded a straight line where the paint stopped. It was quite easy to get a straight line using my foam brush.

Once I got the bronze coat solidly applied and dried, I started on the designs. The purple spoon was very simple. I first tried taping off the bands to paint them purple, but I didn't have the right tape/the spoon was not as smooth as it could have been, so the paint seeped underneath the tape. Since that was frustrating, I just freehanded the bands. I ended the thickest purple band below where the bronze paint had ended so that it was obvious where the bronze paint was and where the unpainted spoon section was.

The aqua ribbon spoon was a bit more complicated. I knew I couldn't freehand the wrap around ribbon and keep the thickness and angle consistent, so I attempted the tape again. First, I taped off the bottom of the spiral. I wrapped it so that the spiral ended at the edge of the front of the spoon (top right corner in the picture below). Getting that result was a bit tricky; I had to rewrap my tape a few times to get the angle right. Then, I taped the top part of the spiral. I made sure to keep the same amount of space between the old tape and the new tape throughout the entire spoon so that my design would be consistently sized.

You can see in the two pictures that the bare spots later got painted blue. I slapped quite a few coats of the aqua paint onto the spoon and then pulled off the tape. Of course, paint had still seeped but since I had made extra effort to push the tape down, the seepage was not as bad. I was able to clean it up a bit more freehand. I decided against an aqua band at the bottom, so I freehanded a straight line of aqua where necessary and left the bronze as is.

Enjoy this post? Read the whole list of Briana's $5 Christmas gifts and check out our DIY monogrammed jewelry dish!