Project: Dot Painted Plates

      Last week, for LJizzle's bachelorette party, we did something a little different.  Instead of going to a pottery studio, I bought plates at Target for us to paint.  This is not an idea that I came up with - I first read about it on Under the Sycamore, and then I saw it again on Centsational Girl's blog.  I had been wanting an excuse to try this out, and when we needed a fun and cheap plan, this is what we came up with.  The tutorial on Under the Sycamore is great and gives all the info you would need on the paint.  However, in that tutorial, she free-hands the designs, and I wanted something that could be easily replicated by a group.  Here is what I came up with for transferring the design.

I went online and looked for pretty fonts, since I had decided I wanted to do some kind of monogrammed dessert dishes for Laura.  I found Needle N' Thread, which has some old embroidery fonts that I thought would work nicely.  I wanted to make one for myself to make sure that it worked, so I downloaded the letter S to my iPhoto.

I put it into a Word Document, so that I could resize it.  I am clearly not very high-tech.  But, it worked.  Then, I printed it out, cut it down a bit and made sure that it was the right size for the plate I had.



Then, I turned it over and used a thick graphite pencil to color over the back of it.  I think a regular pencil would work as well, but since I was going to have a lot of people doing this, I wanted it to be sort of fool proof.



I took the paper and taped it into place on the plate, then traced over it with a ball point pen.



When I removed the paper, the design had transferred perfectly!  How easy is that?  Very.



Then, I took the paint and dot painted around the outline.



Once it is baked, it is dishwasher and microwave safe.  So, at Laura's party, we did a set of 8 dessert plates, 8 ice cream bowls and a cake stand, all in her wedding colors that also coordinate with her everyday dishes.  Each girl got to paint one and signed her name on the back of it.  It turned out to be such fun, and everyone was able to do it and did a great job.

Plates.



Bowls.




Cake Stand.



After doing this and realizing how easy it is, I feel that the possibilities for painted plate fun are endless!

Side Note:
On Centasional Girl's post, it mentioned something about the food safety of it, so I did some research.  The paint company (Pebeo), says that it should not come into contact with food.  After reading several different articles and a tiny bit of research, I am concluding that I would feel perfectly safe eating off of this paint.  This paint is widely used for this exact application and is non-toxic, but does not have FDA approval.  From what I can gather, it looks like the approval is so expensive to get that they haven't gone down that road, and they (the paint company) do not want to be held liable for anything.  If that makes you nervous, you could always keep your paint on the rim of plates or the outside of cups or bowls.