You know what two of the most useful things I own are?
My tiny paintbrush, and my little pot of gold-leaf paint.
I’m serious: I use gold leaf on errything. I attack thrift-shop chairs with it, spruce up picture frames with it, accent flower pots with it. I even make tiny plastic-animal terrariums with it (really).
The other day, Kendrick and Indy went out for a walk in the hills next to our house, and came home with this:
I wish I had taken a photo of it with something to give it context. The thing is at least a foot long; it’s like a Dr. Seussian pinecone with a dash of Alice in Wonderland. And when you find something that cool, my feeling is you keep it…but useless clutter – even of the Dr. Seussian pinecone persuasion – makes me a little nuts, so I tried to think of a use, and came up with:
Planter.
Did you know you can make practically anything into a planter?
It’s true. See evidence, above: that’s a dinosaur toy that my son hasn’t played with in as long as I can remember. I cut a hole in it, painted it gold (not all that well, as you can see; whatever, it was late at night and I was watching It Follows and freaking out), and stuffed some cactus soil and succulent cuttings in its back. (In a plot twist that will surprise exactly none of the parents among you, my son decided the very next morning that the ONLY toy he wanted to play with was his plastic dinosaur. No, not that one. ONLY the blue one and NO SUBSTITUTES WILL BE ACCEPTED. Sigh.)
Anyway, here’s what I did with the pinecone:
Broke out my gold leaf…
Painted the tips…
And added some soil and trimmings from my backyard. (Whether those succulents will take to the soil or not is a matter of debate, but it honestly doesn’t really matter, because, if you recall, what the rest of the country thinks of as succulents worth paying $7 a pot for, people in this neck of the woods think of as “that crap on the side of the road.”)
Decor that’s pretty…and free? Nice.
