Upcycled Vintage Wooden Bowls

Well, that didn’t take long.

Yesterday I pulled these bowls from my Etsy stock. They’re the sort of 1960s-era teak bowls that you see often in thrift stores. I knew I wanted to paint them, but I decided to gather a few inspiration pieces on Pinterest to see if there were any better ideas out there than I’d arrived at in my head.

The materials I used were all free to me since I had them all on hand.

          – vintage teak wood bowls
          – blue painter’s tape
          – fine sandpaper
          – 2 1/2″ short-handled angle brush
          – Zinsser 1-2-3 Primer
          – various Benjamin Moore paint samples left over from other projects
          – Krylon Painter’s Touch paint pen in gold

Then I applied the tape to the bowls in fairly random fashion, making sure that the edges were tight against the sides of the bowl.

I used fine sandpaper to sand the area I intended to paint, then thoroughly dusted the sanded area with a microfiber cloth.

I debated whether or not to prime, but ultimately decided that it couldn’t hurt. I use this Zinsser primer for pretty much everything, which is why I bought a full gallon of it the last time I needed it.

From all of our various blue and green painting projects, I have a dozen or so cans of sample paint hanging around that I like to use whenever I have little projects like this. It’s much cheaper than going out and buying craft paint in every color and chemically there’s not much difference in most brands. Quality latex paint uses acrylic binders so if you’re not intending to put your project in the dishwasher (which I wouldn’t ever recommend with wood bowls anyway), I didn’t see why my samples wouldn’t work just as well as tiny tubes of craft paint.

Once all the bowls were painted, I pulled off the tape and touched up the few areas where paint had seeped under using a razor blade. However, they were still looking a little unfinished. to me so I thought about it a bit before I remembered the gold paint pen that I had picked up when I was looking for options to touch up a gold bar cart I had bought for the shop.

I edged all the paint with a gold stripe, which I thought gave them the finishing touch they needed.

Personally, I think this is a vast improvement.

What do you think?

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0 thoughts on “Upcycled Vintage Wooden Bowls

  1. I like the end result! They look so much better with some color. Nice project.
    Stopping by from the "Inspiration Spotlight Link Up".
    Now following you on Bloglovin, Twitter and Facebook. Looking forward to reading more of your posts.
    Have a great week 🙂
    Bismah @
    Simple Mama

  2. I liked them before, but they're too stinkin' cute now.

    We had a similar set when I was growing up, but the salad bowls always went in the dishwasher (why?) and they were ruined. People, don't put wood in the dishwasher!

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