Feeling dippy

Back in April, when I experimented with dipping vases in paint, m1k1 requested that I do some for her and even offered a stash of vases to work with. She dropped them off to me when she visited last month, and I finally made time to play with then (and the nail varnish I bought in The Blue Mountains).

(Because of course it's easier to just dip the vases in a pot of paint but I wanted to see how it worked if I combined the idea of using nail varnish to paint vases with the concept of dipping. Just to make life difficult. But I figured that if I'd already spent $2.30 a bottle on nail varnish it would be silly driving all the way across town to buy extra paint colours as well. And besides, since I'd been given 12 vases I had the ability to stuff a few of them up and still have enough to revert to the painting option...)

I gathered the following together for my experiment:

Vases (of course)
Bottles of nail varnish
Small plastic containers to pour the nail varnish into for dipping (I hoped I could pour the extra back into the bottles at the end)
Blu Tack
Baking paper
Paper towel

plus paint brushes with bottoms big enough to fit fairly snuggly into the mouths of the vases.

And to add to the fun, I decided to see if using masking tape and spray paint would work as well, so I also gathered a roll of masking tape, a pair of scissors and a can of spray paint.

First up, I tested the spray paint theory and wrapped the top of the vase with a length of the masking tape (rubbing the edge with my fingernail to make sure it was firmly attached along the bottom edge) and took it outside to spray.

(This was the method I used for my dipped stool.)

Hmmm... not looking good so far. But I put it aside to dry and returned to the nail varnishing.

First, I placed the end of a paint brush into the mouth of the vase, using blu tack to hold it firmly in place (and checking that everything was straight).

I filled the container with enough nail varnish to cover the height of the vase I wanted coloured (making a guess at how much extra height would be achieved when I placed the vase in the container.) 

And dipped the vase in the varnish, twisting slightly as I removed it

before blotting the base a couple of times on the paper towel

and leaving it to dry while I dipped a second vase.

I poured (most of) the left-over polish back into the bottle, and repeated the process with the other two colours and the rest of the vases I had chosen.

And then I got carried away.

Experimenting with using a toothpick dipped in the varnish to add spots to vase (quite successfully)

and a small paintbrush to add stripes to another (not so successfully).

I varnished the inside of the stripy vase, and—while I was on a roll—made a puddle of varnish on the baking paper and dipped the lips of the vases into it, once again using a twisting motion to get even coverage.

And that spray-painting 'failure'? I added another coat, waited for it to dry and removed the masking tape:

(Just don't look too closely at the back of it, OK?)

So, in conclusion:
1. Dipping in nail varnish works, but is much more fiddly that using paint (as you can dip straight into the paint jar rather than messing around with decanting the nail varnish), and the nail varnish is gloopier, making it harder to get a straight line at the top.
2. Spray painting also works, but be careful not to put too much on each coat (my problem was that I was trying to take photos as well as paint, so my first coat was too thick). Placing the masking tape on straight, making sure the edges are well attached, and prising it off when the paint is dry can be fiddly.