Growing Hearts Platter

So...I may have a bit of an obsession with trees as decorations.  You can find them sprinkled around my house--in the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen--you get the idea.  Maybe it has something to do with the hundreds of family trees I have drawn as a genetic counselor over the years...by the way, do you have your family health history recorded?  If not, this is a great tool to do so.  In any case, I was of course drawn to this pattern on one of my recent ceramics endeavors, and I have aptly named this project the Growing Hearts Platter.


I'm glad I'm sharing this project with you now because last week I got a little reminder of how enriching it can be to focus on growing relationships. I was on my way downtown to pick up my new dining room curtains (yeah!), and I decided to call my husband to see if he wanted to meet up for lunch.  We ended up going to this really cute little sandwich shop with locally sourced fresh-made food.  Yep, I'm a sucker for these places, but it's because they are usually so good.  I wasn't disappointed.

As we sat eating our sandwiches and soup, my husband told me how glad he was that I called.  That he liked seeing me in the middle of the day.  I listened to him talk about pet insurance policies, and he listened to me ramble on about life after graduation.  He programmed my phone so that I had directions to get to curtain store from his office because he knew I had no idea how to get to this place that was a mere 5 minutes away.  I inquired what I would ever do without my directions and weather man...  

The hour passed by quickly, and on my way home, I thought about how we know just how to build each other up.  I could have decided I had too many errands to run to call, or he could have said he was too busy at work to leave, but we didn't.  We don't always have days like these, of course.  We aren't perfect.  But days like this remind me how awesome it is that we get to spend our lives together...good and bad days included.   

Ok, back to the project.  I used a template that was available at The Paint Spot, but hopefully the picture below will allow you to have a template to use if you want to paint this yourself.  It is quite a bit of detail work, so it took a while to complete, but I like the final product!  I could have worked on getting the lines a little sharper, but I really like the self-painted look that some of the imperfections lend to it.  

I started by painting the whole platter with three coats of white paint.  I then used special tracing paper to trace the pattern onto the bowl.  And then, let the detail painting commence!  

The Growing Hearts Platter was painted with Duncan brand paints.    Follow my blog with Bloglovin