Make your own flowerpot!

"He's plastered!"

                                        (My Favorite Year;1982)

Recently, I've been thinking hard how I can use an old plastic bottle and I quickly came up with an idea to use it for making a flowerpot (and a tealight holder). Nowadays, almost all bottles have various grooves on them, so patterns can turn out really nice. I'm really satisfied with the effect, so I want to share it with you. The same way, you can use a paper (or plastic) cup (like those from vending machines) - an example of  it you can see at the end of today's tutorial.

difficulty: medium
estimated time:  3-4 days (depends on the size of the mold)

You need:

• a plastic bottle (or a paper cup)
• building plaster
• water
• a toilet paper tube
• wide tape
• a wooden skewer
• scissors
• a piece of sandpaper (optionally)

Tutorial steps:

1. Cut off the bottom of the bottle (around 7 cm from the bottom) to make a mold for your flowerpot.

2. Stick the tape to one end of the toilet paper tube. Do it several times to make it leakproof. Put the skewer through the centre of the tube around 4.5 cm from its taped end. Put… this thing into the mold to see if it doesn’t touch the bottom of the mold. If it does, put the skewer a little lower. If you want to make a tealight holder, use a tealight instead of the contraption shown below.

3.  Mix some plaster and some water in an old bowl. Their proportion should be 0.6 l of water to 1 kg of dry plaster. I used 410 g of dry plaster to 0.25 l of water. But remember about buoyancy – take less water than your mold can contain to prevent the substance from pouring out of it when you’ll put the toilet paper tube into it.

4. Pour the liquid plaster to the mold – you have to do this within 10 minutes since mixing because later it will begin hardening.

5. Put the tube contraption in the centre of the mold and tape the ends of the skewer to the edges. Leave it for one and a half hour. After that, remove the tube.

6. Next day, cut the mold a little bit and remove it. Leave the flowerpot for the next 48 hours.

7. Then smooth and align the edges of the pot using the piece of sandpaper and decorate it as you wish.

This kind of flowerpots can be used only as a base for making decorations from polystyrene balls or for dry environment plants (e.g. cacti). If plaster gets wet, it can be easily damaged.

And this is my tealight holder made from a paper cup:

Downloadables
- Printable Version (pdf)

Next week: Friendship Bracelets - requested tutorial