When I Dip, You Dip, We Dip

'I had a vision of loooove...'

Matt sang this to me the other day as I was getting our tree decorated!

Bringing back the oldies!

He asked me the other day why we don't listen to Mariah Carey anymore. Did we ever?

Who am I kidding? We totally rocked out to her Christmas album every year! :)

Keeping with my song theme, remember that one, about the dipping?

I sang that to myself as I had a dipping party!

It was my first. It just seems so, I don't know, messy and involved. Why do it when you can just buy stuff dipped now?

I answered my own question when I looked at these three items this year.

First we have these pumpkins.

I have fallen out of love with them and have tried several times to revive them. They were once brown, then gold, now orange. I thought they would be cute dipped white.

Next we have this filler stuff. I bought this with the specific purpose of making a garland out of it. I thought of it a while ago and wanted to make one for Thanksgiving. Of course I couldn't find white ones, enter dipping.

Last up are these pine cones. I just wanted to dip pine cones. I've seen them and hey, since I'm getting the paint out and making a mess anyway.

I got myself some plastic, for heavens sake I decided to do this project on my wood floors! Wiser to do it outside for sure! I made sure my working area was nice and covered! Then I got a wide and deep plastic bucket, my cooling rack, (which is now my painting rack... which is fine because I paint more than I bake...) the clearance white paint I picked up at Walmart, a stick from my backyard and all of the things I wanted to dip.

I started with my twiggy ball filler things. Just googled that, maybe they are wicker spheres? Does that sound better? I found these at Marshalls for about $6.

In they go...

These spheres would look great just dipped, but not for what I had in mind. I may need to try again and just dip. This time I went for the full coating!

Pushed it around and got it all coated, using my stick. Beware that your stick could leave remains in your paint. If you intend to reuse it, clean your stick first! :)

The great thing about the stick is that it goes through the wicker, giving it good support during the transfer. I had no white fingers!

Onto the cooling rack they go!

I let them dry for a day, just to be sure. I also moved them around, so they could dry evenly-ish.

The more solid wicker balls weren't so great to do. I only did one. There is not enough space for the paint to drain out of the ball.

The pine cones were easy to do, just held onto the natural part and dipped in a swirly motion to get the paint into the insides of the pinecones.

The pumpkins took me a little more time. My bucket wasn't quite wide enough and I didn't have quite enough paint to just 'dip' it. I had to hold the bucket at an angle and move the pumkin around a bunch to get it dipped.

This has nothing to do with dipping, but I took the rest of that paint and painted pegboard which I intend to use in my closet.

I used those wicker spheres, with some gold ones as my Thanksgiving banner.

To hold them in place I fished my twine through and tied it on one side of the sphere, then moved to my next sphere. You have to tie them or they will all slide to the middle.