Friends! Spring has sprung and it has got me wanting to be surrounded by beautiful botanicals, both indoors and out. So, here I am with a fairly fast and inexpensive way to add a little personal touch to the plants you keep around your place and the vessels that hold them. Let me be clear, I have no idea how to repot a plant, so this plant is literally sitting in its original potter, inside the painted pot. Whatever. This is why I’m in charge of the pretty pot part, people! We all have our strengths.

For this project, you’ll need a few things:

Let’s get started!

Step One: Draw a Regular Polygon, except not.

I’m a big fan of minimal design and easy to recreate crafts. For this planter, I knew I wanted a simple geometric shape as the basis of my pattern, and I love how the triangles turned out.  You can certainly choose from the sea of shapes in the Silhouette Design Store, or you can create a variety of geometric shapes with a little hidden feature set within the Draw a Regular Polygon tool in Silhouette Studio®. The tool’s name is unfortunately misleading, because you can draw so much more than a regular polygon by simply sliding the number of sides higher or lower—SAY WHAT?! I know. So, with my shape sides set to 3, I’ve got myself a triangle. Look at that ‘regular ol’ polygon’ being not-so-regular now.

 

Step Two: Cut & Place Stencil Material Shapes

With your triangle (or chosen shape) sized according to your preference/pot size, set up your cut page in Silhouette Studio® by laying out multiples of your shape onto an 8.5 in. x 11 in. workspace. Tip: The replicate window within Silhouette Studio® will help a lot for quick duplications of shapes. For this project, the triangles I created were about 0.625 in. on a 6.5 in. terra cotta pot. Pots like this can be found at your local home repair/garden shop and are shockingly cheap. I got this one for under $5—my kind of home decor project!

Feed an adhesive stencil sheet through your CAMEO or Portrait, blue side up (I like to put mine on a cutting mat first.) With the appropriate material setting chosen in your cut settings window (recommended blade setting of 3,) send your shapes to cut! Once the stencil shapes are cut out, you’ll want to place your shapes onto the face of the pot in whatever fashion you choose. I went with a confetti feel.

Step Three: Paint & Peel

Now, a couple tips here! I actually made two of these: one where I added the shapes directly to an unpainted pot, thus allowing the shapes themselves to be the raw terra cotta in the end, and one where I painted the entire pot a metallic copper first. Once that paint color had dried, I applied the stencil pieces on top individually and painted over the stencil bits, covering the center portion of the pot with a couple coats of white paint. With this route, your shapes will be the underlying color (copper, in my case) like the rim of the pot.

(Pssst… If you’re like, ‘yo, hold the paint’—I’ve got you. This project can be similarly replicated by cutting vinyl/gold foil shapes and then applying them directly to the pot like stickers, without the added mess.)

So. Many. Possibilities.

There you have it! Whichever route you want to take, you’ll end up with a homemade pot to cradle your plant-baby in while you cross your fingers hoping that you don’t kill this one, too. Team Succulents for life… or death—wherever you fall on that green-thumb spectrum. I would rather have my thumbs covered in paint.

What are your favorite house plants?