The other day, Kendrick and I had dinner at our friend Erin’s house (she of the awesome Pinterest and crafting blog and Peekskill-trip planning skills). She and her husband have an amazing midcentury buffet table in their dining room that they use to display various odds and ends that they’ve collected and/or made over the years, and when I spotted a tiny dome housing even tinier gold animals sitting on the buffet I was immediately transfixed. I had visions of them wandering through some obscure thrift store in some adorable middle-of-nowhere town and stumbling across priceless gilded tigers the size of thimbles that had once been the playthings of royal children during the Qing Dynasty, but that they had managed to score for five bucks.
Or something.
Five seconds later my son had whipped that glass dome off and plucked the animals off of their stand, and I was running towards him, with visions of him destroying some precious, irreplaceable artifact (and thereby destroying our newish friendship in the process). I snatched them out of his hands (–> tears), only to discover…
they were plastic.
Erin, it turns out, shares my affinity for painting everything that she can get her hands on with gold leaf. And so a few days later, when the dome I ordered from Amazon arrived, I made my own tiny gold creature terrarium using a few of my son’s toy dinosaurs.
The best part?
It may look like an artifact from some bygone era…but touching is totally allowed.
What You Need:
What You Do:
1. Use a small brush to paint animals gold, and set on newspaper to dry overnight.
That’s it.
