Trick AND Treat Decorative Buckets

Sometimes I save things. Sometimes my family looks at me like I'm crazy for saving them. I'm not a hoarder, but I do like to repurpose things when I can. It is when I can come up with a project like this that I can defend myself.

We like licorice around here. Okay...I like licorice (Picabo is also a fan, but only of the red). I buy it in the fun big tubs. Well...we just happened to have transferred all of the licorice into Ziploc bags thanks to the laziness that results in leaving the tub open and thus the licorice growing hard. So I had two perfect little licorice tubs sitting around with nothing to do. I'm SO happy I kept them.

Guess who takes before pictures and forgets the lids? This girl!

This project was fairly simple, the worst part was waiting for paint to dry. Have I mentioned that I am not in the least bit patient?

I started by washing the buckets and removing the labels. The labels were on there pretty good, so it took a little bit of scrubbing.

After they were all nice and clean, I painted one black and one orange (fittingly a color called pumpkin) using acrylic paints. The black was fairly simple, but did require two coats. The orange was a complete pain in the neck, required four coats and probably could've gone for a 5th.

While they dried, I marched upstairs to the scrapbook room and cut myself a frame template using my Pazzle. I made the frame into a sticky note using my WackyTac and let that dry. Because I am terribly impatient, I made two separate templates so that I could do both buckets at the same time.

I then adhered a template to each bucket and painted inside the edges with the opposite paint. So...orange for the black and black for the orange. And...I let that dry...

I peeled off the templates to reveal some pretty nice looking labels if I say so myself. And I do...

I have taken over the nook table as "craft central" for October.

Then it was back to the Pazzle and WackyTac to make stencils for "trick" and "treat". I picked a nice Halloweeny looking font and painted over the templates using the original color paint for each bucket.

Once again...waited for paint to dry...

After I peeled off the templates and did a little bit of touch up, I adhered a ribbon to each bucket for a little added decoration.

Other than the paint drying, it all went pretty quickly. I'd say the entire project (without including drying time) probably took me about four hours for both buckets. And now I have a new fun decoration for my living room table.

 This post is part of a series. For other posts on Creative Crafting (including a lot more Halloween themed projects), click here.