Hand-Painted Milk Jugs

Looking for easy and inexpensive ways to spruce up your kitchen decor?  Try your hand at glass painting!  Plates, jugs, vases, glasses–your inner Monet might just be clamoring to get out.  Now that it’s summertime and garage sales are in full swing, it’s easy to pick up champagne glasses for ten cents apiece or serving platters for a buck.  Your local craft store (in my case, Munro’s in Berkley) will carry a full palette of colors for painting glass and ceramics.  Some can even be baked the next day and thus be rendered dishwasher-proof.  (Read the fine print twice to make sure that the paint you choose is safe for use on eating utensils.)

You don’t have to be a still-life painter to pull off a nifty geometric design or subtle layers of color shading.  The former can easily be done by drawing out your design on a piece of paper first and then taping your self-made stencil inside of the glass or underneath the plate; the latter can be created in under a minute with a bit of judicious sponge blotting.  Or you can just let your creativity flow and see what happens!