Birch Bark Vase

For today’s craft tutorial, I’m going to show you how to make a birch bark vase. This thing  is a little bit of everything I love: elegant, quick, simple, cheap, and easy! Perfect!

Birch Bark Vase

I love birch trees; they’re elegant, simple,  and the grey/white/brown colors are just gorgeous. So when I saw a gorgeous painted birch bark vase at Turtles And Tails I knew I had to try to recreate it!

Painted Birch Bark Vase

You only need three things for this project:

  • a glass cylinder vase, about 10″-12″ tall
  • rubber bands
  • white spray paint

Start by adding rubber bands to your vase at random intervals. The beauty of this craft is that there is no right or wrong way to add the rubber bands. Just put them on there! Do make sure all the bands are flat against the vase with no twists, otherwise the paint will seep under and ruin your lines. I’d suggest using about 12 or so on a 10″-12″ tall vase. I overlapped a few of them and left a few of them separate because the lines on a birch tree aren’t uniform.

Birch Bark Vase - Start With Rubberbands

Once you have your rubber bands situated, give the vase a few light coats of white spray paint. I ended up doing two coats with about half an hour in between them.

Birch Bark Vase - Spray Paint

Spray Paint Tip: I don’t know how I didn’t figure this out earlier, but if you put your project on a plain sheet of paper, you’ll be able to rotate it to spray all sides of your project without touching it and messing up the wet paint!

Remove the rubber bands once the paint is completely dry, and you’re done!

Birch Bark Vase

If you’re a bit heavy-handed when you spray paint (**ahem** not me, at all!), you may see some ridges of paint when you remove the rubber bands. That’s ok,  just pretend you did it on purpose to give your “tree” some texture! Or if you want the ridges to go away, get some very fine grit sand paper and lightly sand it down. You can also use sand paper to clean up any messy edges where paint may have seeped under the rubber bands.

Birch Bark Vase

Fill it with some fun flowers, or weird bead decor things, and you’re done! Or stick a candle in it. The lines look way cool with a lit flame inside!

Birch Bark Vase

What other cool ways have you seen to use spray paint for decorating? I used some gold spray paint on the beer bottle I used for my fall decor earlier this year. Which I guess counts as a vase. Sort of. 🙂

JonMarke brought home a giant branch-thing that had been spray painted silver. I haven’t used it for decorating yet, but I will! And in the meantime it makes an awesome photo prop. You can see it in the pictures I took of the paper curl ornaments, and in the background of the tin can snowman photo too.

 

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Jessi Wohlwend

I believe that anyone can do crafts and DIY projects, regardless of skill or experience. I love sharing simple craft ideas, step by step DIY project tutorials, cleaning hacks, and other tips and tricks all with one goal in mind: giving you the tools you need to “do it yourself”, complete fun projects, and make awesome things!

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Reader Interactions

  1. Tracie@MiddleClassModern says

    11 years ago

    Followed you from Nifty Thrifty. I keep seeing this project, but these are the best instructions and I think you just gave me the courage to attempt it!

    • Jessi says

      11 years ago

      Aww thanks Tracie, you definitely should try it! It’s easier than it looks 🙂

  2. Gail says

    11 years ago

    This is absolutely lovely! Nice copy, cat!

  3. Bethany says

    11 years ago

    Looks great! I’m really digging how it turned out. 🙂

  4. Shannah @ Just Us Four says

    11 years ago

    I love this! I actually bought a vase and some rubber bands with intentions to do something similar but haven’t gotten around it to yet. I’ll just admire yours for now 🙂

  5. Leah says

    11 years ago

    This is so pretty Jessi, love it – and the rubber band idea is genius, thanks for the tip.

    • Jessi says

      11 years ago

      It totally is easy! I made a second one for my mom last night; it took about half an hour plus time for the paint to dry. 🙂

  6. Heidi says

    11 years ago

    Jessi, this is gorgeous! And so simple. Pinning.

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