Yay for actually posting! Ok, I'm going to start with the project that I initially planned to open the blog with ... even though it is now several months old.
I decided to try decorating tiles after seeing some gorgeous ones at 365 Tile A Day, when I happened to be at the Riverside Arts Market in Jacksonville, FL. Unfortunately, I'm not actually artistic at all, and my attempts to reproduce some of them didn't really work out (at all).
But I still loved the idea of it - and tiles are so cheap! - that a few months ago when I had a bit of wiggle room in my budget, I went ahead and bought oil-based paint pens off Amazon. I bought glazed ceramic tiles at a hardware store (the small ones are only about $0.16). And for inspiration, I used traditional Spanish and Mediterranean tile patterns from Old World Tiles.
The process is really simple - and because these are meant to look handmade, it's ok for the designs to be not-quite-totally what the originals are. I did 9 small tiles, and I'm sticking them on a plain wooden stool I have. Because I really liked the idea of a mixed set of tiles (totally ripped of Old World Tiles here), I made 9 different tiles. Also, I don't think I could get 2 that looked exactly alike, so this took care of that too!
So that's all the tiles, sitting on top of the stool itself. I stuck to primary colors (+green) because those are the markers that came in my set, and I think they work well as a theme, of sorts.
I liked the stool so much, I went ahead and made several larger tiles to use as trivets. Feeling very smart, I decided to bake the tiles, so the paint would dry faster. Bad choice. The trivets (I didn't bake the tiles from the stool) ended up well-glazed, but totally different colors. So I wouldn't recommend that. But I let the tiles on the stool sit for over a month, and the paint is now water-proof. And as long as you use the trivets to hold serving dishes - not actually hot pans - their color is safe as well.
The paint pens themselves are super easy to use. I only tried Sharpie, so I can't speak for other brands, but I found that the colors came out crisp, the paint didn't run, and it IS washable when you first use it (on glazed tiles, anyway) so you can wipe off mistakes with a wet paper towel.
