Sunday 5 March 2017

Made: Painted Seagrass Baskets

I love a DIY project, and I especially love an IKEA hack: to take something that's cheap and mass-produced and turn it into something unique is so satisfying.

When we were in Norfolk a couple of weeks ago I saw some beautiful painted seagrass baskets on sale for £40 in a gift shop, which is massively out of my price range. So instead, I hatched a plan...

You will need
- A seagrass basket (mine are IKEA Fladis, £9 each, but you can find them in all shapes and sizes in places like Wilkos and Home Bargains).
- A pot of tester paint
- A paintbrush
- Old newspaper
- Spray varnish (this is probably not essential, but it will make the baskets more hard-wearing)

I would do a step-by-step but it's so ridiculously easy that I don't want to insult your intelligence: basically, put paper down, paint basket, wait for it to dry, spray with varnish.

The only issues I encountered were that masking tape doesn't seem to stick to seagrass, so I had to go freehand with the paint. Also, on the green basket - which required more than one coat of paint - the paint started seeping through to the inside of the basket. To solve that, I let it dry then rubbed the inside down with wire wool, which cleared it.
Because I was limited by the tester paints my local Homebase had in stock, I'm not totally sold on the colours - the mint could be bolder and the pink a bit less Pepto Bismol bright. But I'm too impatient to have waited while searching for the perfect colours, and the beauty of a project like this is that, if and when I tire of these colours, I can just sandpaper the varnish off and repaint.

5 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Thanks! I'm already wanting to change the colours so they might not turn out to be such bargains, but hey ho!

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  2. They look really good! And what a bargain - £40 - who pays that amount for a basket?! I haven't been to Ikea in aaaaages, but my need for storage might see me making a trip soon...

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    Replies
    1. Can you even imagine having the kind of money where £40 for a basket seems reasonable?!

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  3. These look amazing! I love a bargain Ikea hack, until recently the drawers in our bedroom were their Rast basics painted white and duck egg

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