Vanity Tray

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If you're like me, you can sit for hours pinning and repinning items in the 'DIY and Crafts' category on Pinterest. Which wouldn't be a problem - except for the fact that I spend so much time pinning, I never get to  doing! Now that I actually know where I'll be living for the next couple of years, I can get to crafting and actually have a place to put all my creations! With that being said, I'm starting small with a cute bottle cap tray for my vanity (did I mention I have a fabulous built in vanity at my place?!)

I used the instructions from this blog: http://sweetsomethingdesign.blogspot.com/2010/07/bottle-cap-tray.html

Of course, since I drink my coffee black, I don't really need a tray to keep sugar, creamer, and other coffee fixins. But I was thinking a colorful tray with some glass apothecary jars (like these: http://www.etsy.com/listing/107557166/vintage-apothecary-jars-4-jars?ref=usr_faveitems) and perfume bottles would look really cute in my bathroom. So I got to craftin!

I grabbed some spray paint from my personal stock and filled in the gaps by picking some up at Lowes. I used a total of four colors: gray, white, turquoise, and black (the blue on the far right in the photo below actually looked just like the turquoise color, so i grabbed a black spray paint out of the craft closet and it turned out just as well if not better!). I went to the craft store and grabbed an unfinished wooden tray, and a box of floral setting resin. Then I pulled out my collection of bottle caps and headed to the back yard to paint.

The tray took some experimenting before I got the color right. first I sprayed it black, but I changed my mind, so I tried spraying it in the gray, but then it looked really green. So finally, i ended up just brushing it with a cool gray interior paint that was in the garage.

Here is the before:

And after:

I bought the 12 oz box of resin, and it just barely didn't cover the top of the bottle caps, so I'm going to go back and grab a 6oz box to add another thin layer to the top to cover everything evenly. But other than that, and it taking 36 hours to cure, its done! I'll post more pictures once its in place and doing its job.

Overall, I'd say I'm pretty satisfied with the way it turned out. I definitely should have sanded the tray before I spray painted it, and unfortunately there was just barely not enough room to add another row of caps, so there's a little more room around the edges than I would like, but what can you do? I can hardly tell now that its done anyway.

If I ever make another in the future, I think using buttons, paperclips, pencil shavings, yarn scraps, or beads could be fun.