Knock it Off - PB Easter Stakes - Part 1

How cute are these Pottery Barn Easter garden stakes? Super cute, right? Well as much I think they would be adorable in my front yard, I'm not about to pay $49.00 for them. You're paying this because it is *handpainted* and vintagey.. Well readers, I'm going to walk you through making the blue one for at least half the cost, and you get bragging rights! Here is what you will need: * apx. 8"x11" solid piece of wood (I bought mine at the Wood Connection in UT) * hobby paint in robin blue, chocolate brown, cream, yellow, pink, orange, celery green * white vinyl if you have a vinyl cutter OR get some large white alphabet stickers OR plan on handpainting the letters. *wooden stake *Gorilla Glue OR something equally strong *paint brushes and a makeup sponge. How long you will need: about 2 hours What do you do? 1.) Paint the front & sides of wood piece robin blue. I buy cheap-o hobby paint, so I needed 3 coats. You could also spray paint this if you are so inclined. 2.) Now that it is a solid blue, you are going to age it! Take a makeup sponge and just a little bit of brown paint. Dab most of that off and streak it all over.

3.) With the bottom of a paintbrush, dab cream paint dots all around the border of the wood piece.

4.) Your board should look something like this now. 5.) For those of you that are totally scared about painting, I kept you in mind for the next step. Rather than freehand paint the letters, I cut them out of white vinyl on my Pazzle. You could also use large alphabet stickers instead. Or if the idea doesn't make you break out in hives, you can absolutely paint the letters on.

6. The next part, you will actually start painting..so it may get scary, but remember Pottery Barn is charging those big bucks because it looks & was hand painted. This is not supposed to be perfect, this is not supposed to look like it came down an assembly line. Take a deep breath and have fun! So I drew an arrow very similar to PB's in pencil. If you don't like how it came out, you can always redraw or paint over it. I did the base coat in the celery green. Again because I work with cheapo paint, I had to paint the arrow at least 2 times. 7.) Now we want to give our arrow some dimension, some kick. So we are going to give it a dark chocolate shadow. Load up your brush with brown paint on one side of the bristles and green on the other - just like below. Practice painting on a piece of paper till you are happy with the results. Make sure your brush is loaded up and paint down the left side in one swoop - no wiggling back and forth, just one swoop. 8.) See that was fun, right? Not too scary, and we are almost done with painting! Here comes the trickest part. You are going to draw your chickie and broken egg. Again, if you aren't happy with the first draw, feel free to pencil it again. Look below - I added some junk in my chickie's truck :o) 9.) Once you are satisfied with the rendering, fill the chickie in solid yellow and the egg shells in pink. Again..it took me a couple coats to make it solid. 10.) Paint chickie's legs and feet brown. Make a small dot of brown for the eye. Dab a small triangle of orange for the beak. Now we are going to give chickie some depth as well. Load up your brush in the cream and swoop from tail to under belly. 11.) Now we are going to give chickie a wing. Load up the brush with half brown and half cream, and in a single swoop paint on the wing. Next give the pink egg big cream polka dots. And that is it for part one! Can you believe it? Did I miss something? Need more explanation? Let me know. The next part will just be spray varnish and adhering the wood stake. So if you are comfortable with those on your own, feel free to jump to the end. I hope you enjoyed this PB knock off. It is a super cute lawn decoration for your Easter hunt! I will be doing more designer knock offs, so feel free to submit any links. I'm not WonderWoman, so there may be things I won't feel adequate in tackling..but let's push the limits!