10 Ideas for Recycling Tin Cans into Gorgeous Home Decor for Spring

Hi there, welcome to A Well-Purposed Woman. I'm Elizabeth and thanks so much for joining me. Today I'm going to show you 10 different tin can planter ideas for spring for use with real and artificial plants. Now I don't know about you but I am really looking forward to spring this year and so I loved doing these planter cans with the different plants in and even though I've done a ton of tin can projects I'm always so amazed at the beautiful projects you can come up with just by using the cans from your dinner. It's truly amazing. I hope you'll be just as amazed as you watch this video on how to make 10 planters for spring out of tin cans. And if it's your first time here don't forget to hit that red subscribe button but thanks so much for being here and let's get started. For this first craft we're going to be making a faux corrugated metal planter and I'm just using a tin can that I actually had spray painted green for a Christmas project but I didn't end up using it. So I'm using it for this craft. If you didn't miss those 10 craft ideas for Christmas I'll link them below. But I have this corrugated paper that I got at Michaels and I'm just going to go ahead and wrap that paper around the tin can and then I measured the can on the paper just to cut out a piece of the paper that matched the tin can. And you can just use a paper cutter or scissors and just go ahead and cut off the same size paper as your can. Then take the paper and attach it to the can with your hot glue gun. So I just glued a thin strip of the glue onto the paper and then I pressed it down onto the can. Next you're going to color the can so take acrylic paint. I used black, white, and gray and I mixed those three colors to get a tin looking color and then I just applied that to the paper with a foam brush. And you can also use spray paint for this if you have metal looking spray paint that would work just as well. And once the paint dries you can use it as a planter. And the other one I spray painted gold and then I just used the craft paper corrugated paper on top without painting it. So you can see both options. With this next option we're going to be using joint compound to make a faux cement planter. And so I just had this joint compound on hand. We were redoing our closet doors with it and I had some extra so I just took a tin can and just applied the joint compound on the outside of the can really trying to cover up the different stripes that are on the side of the tin can. So I did a nice thick layer and I just kind of layered it on without any rhyme or reason. I just put on a chunky layer and tried to cover all parts of the tin can. Eventually I just took my finger and I kind of smoothed out the layers of the compound with my finger just trying to give it a nice even look. I've seen people use a Ziploc bag and then just kind of smooth it out with that as well but I was okay with a little bit of mess and I just smoothed out the layer on the outside of the can. Then I just took my finger and I went around the rim of the can just trying to cover all the different spots on it. I waited for the can to dry overnight and then I just took some gray chalk paint and I applied it to the outside of the can to give it a cement look. I did a second pot the same way with the joint compound. Waited it for it to dry and then I added some different colors to the outside and I started with a brown terracotta and covered the entire pot with it. Then I added some grays and creams to it just to give it a layered desert cement look and I like how that turned out as well. Here they are side by side. They're super cute. They're most likely going to be used indoors. You can use either for real plants or fake plants but they're just a cute little way to dress up a tin can. This next planter used these wooden dowels from the Dollar Tree. I used the quarter inch size ones and I just started by bundling the dowels in a little bundle with a rubber band and then I took them outside to my garage and I cut them with the miter saw to be the same height as the tin cans. Then I took my tin can and I covered it with black paint and this is just to cover up all the shiny parts of the tin can. We're going to be attaching the wooden dowels on the outside of the can and so we don't want any of the tin can to show through in between the dowels so just cover the entire can with the black paint. You can also use black spray paint. It's beautiful on tin and turns out really nice and we just covered the entire can with it. I also painted one side of the wooden dowels with the black spray paint and so once that was done then I just took my hot glue gun and I started attaching the wooden dowels around the can. I just attached a little bit of hot glue towards the top and the bottom of the stick and then just placed it on the can and just continue doing that all the way around your can. Once you've covered the entire can with your wooden dowels then just take a paintbrush or black spray paint and just fill in any areas of the can that you missed painting. You can color it black, white, metal color. You could actually have stained these versus painting them so there really is a lot of flexibility with what you can do with these little wooden pieces. For this craft I just did it black so I used my paintbrush and just filled in all the spaces that you could still see the wood and just covered it with a nice black acrylic paint. Now it might be hard to do a perfectly even top or bottom with the wooden dowels depending on how well you cut it with the miter saw. Mine was a little bit crooked on top so what I did is I just took some black seam binding actually and I just hot glued that around the top rim of the can. You could use metal or something plastic or rubber to kind of fill in that and make it even as well. You could also try to cut it closer to make it more even or sand it down a little bit but I just for the sake of easiness I just took this black seam binding and I just hot glued it around the top making the rim have a nice even finish with the wooden dowels. And I actually ended up liking how the little black rim was formed with the seam binding. It looked a little bit closer to some of the fluted planters I'd seen on Pottery Barn so I was pleased with the way it turned out. And then I just added some boho looking black and white upholstery webbing to the outside of the can just to give it a little bit of added interest. You certainly wouldn't have to add anything to it and be cute how it was but I thought the little extra ribbon added a little interest to my planter and I liked how it turned out. And again you can put greens in it, fake or real. And I did have a top lid for a candle that I used and I decided I wanted to put that on the bottom of my planter so you could easily just screw in a little screw on the bottom to attach the two and then you have this little wooden look on the bottom of the planter. It's so cute. I love how it turned out. This is probably one of my favorites. I like the black and the white and then the wood on the bottom. Super cute for spring and I hope you like it too. Next I made some mosaic planters that were inspired by some I had seen on Etsy. And I took some gold and hammered metal and spray painted the outside of a 28 ounce can. And then I took some paper which I thought would look really cute on my cans and I cut that down to the size of the cans. Then I took some dishwasher safe mod podge and I applied that generously on the outside of the can and applied the paper on top of the mod podge. Then I painted over the top of the paper with the mod podge as well. And I just repeated the same process for the second can. And the cans turned out super cute. You could leave them just like this and I think they're a perfect planter for real or fake plants and they're just really cute for spring. Another option is with the pink and white chevron planter. I did add a little bit of boho style lace around it just to give it a little bit of a boho look. I liked that with the planter and thought it added a little bit. But either way they're super cute. The one on the right was done in the same way with the gold spray paint and then just adding the paper on the outside. So perfect for spring. So cute and it really goes with a lot of things. So last summer I was lucky to get a huge bag of leather pieces at a garage sale. So I decided to use some of them with these planters today. And I just had two regular 14 ounce, 15 ounce cans on hand. And I just took this leather that I had scrap leather laying around. I had this yellowish color with this interesting brown seam running through the center of it. And so I cut that down to the size of the can and just hot glued it around the outside of the can. I trimmed off any excess pieces and then just hot glued the leather inside the can. And I cinched it around the bottom and just hot glued it on the bottom as well. Now if you're going to use this for a real plant at this point you could drill a hole in the bottom or holes in this bottom of the can and then use that for your drainage holes in the bottom. I wasn't planning on using this for real plants and so I decided to cover the round circle on the bottom with just a piece of felt. And so I just cut out a piece of felt that matched the bottom of the can and just hot glued that over the top. And that's really it. After you hot glue that in place you can just add plants or whatever you want to use the can for. And then I just repeated that exact same process for the tan suede planter and cut it down to size and hot glued it in place. And I love how these turned out. My husband actually said the gray suede one was his favorite planter of all of them today and I agree. They're super cute and they were so easy to make and you really would never guess it was just from a tin can. These are really nice to use also for pencils or pens or different supplies in your craft room. I love these and I think they're worth doing with some scrap leather. I took inspiration for this next tin craft planter from a piece of scrapbook paper I saw at Joann Fabrics. It had the state of Minnesota on it which is where I live and I thought it'd be a cute present to give to my new neighbor with a little plant inside. And so just like the other ones we did with the paper already I just cut off the scrapbook paper in the same size as the tin planter. And my goal was to make the state of Minnesota be in the center of the planter so I trimmed off the top portion of the paper and trimmed off the bottom just so Minnesota was right in the center. Then I just hot glued the paper in place and trimmed the other side hot glued that side as well. I took the dishwasher safe mod podge and I covered the map with the mod podge. I also decided to line the inside of the can with another portion of the map so I just cut out a piece to go into the center of the can and I secured that in place as well. And once your maps are dry then go ahead and plant your little plant and you can use the drainage holes in the bottom if it's a real plant if it's a faux plant then just go ahead and stick it in your little planter. So easy simple and cost next to nothing to make this cute little planter. If you've been on my channel before you know that I love repurposing items with a new purpose so I had purchased this cute floral top at a Goodwill but I didn't like certain things about how it fit me so I decided to repurpose it into a tin can planter. I cut it up into about one and a half inch strips and then I used this cording that I had bought at a garage sale for a quarter and I inserted that into those fabric strips and then just sewed a seam down the side securing that cording inside the shirt. And I will show you exactly how I did that but once I created the piping then we're going to turn it into a planter. So to start take the strips over to your sewing machine and you're going to just sew all those strips together. So I like to cross them at a 45 degree angle and you can see a better shot of that here you can see how the two strips are crossing at a 45 degree angle and then I just sew a stitch down that angle. Of course as you're doing this just make sure that right sides of the are sewed together when you're sewing that stitch at that 45 degree angle. So again right sides together sew it at the 45 degree angle and there are written instructions linked below for a very thorough tutorial that will give you all the information you're probably looking for. But once you take it out of the sewing machine you can see that the two, and I apologize this video is not the best, but you can see how the two pieces are sewn together. Now once you have your long strip of fabric that you've created from those strips you're going to insert the cording into the center of the fabric and then just sew a stitch closing the fabric around the cording. Now I'm pretty lazy when it comes to sewing piping and I don't use very many pins at all. I just kind of run the strip and the cording along the sewing machine and but what I do do is switch out my regular foot for a zipper foot and that makes sewing the piping a lot easier. So just switch out to a zipper zipper foot on your sewing machine. Just go ahead and run a stitch along the cording securing it in the pieces of the fabric and like I said there is a more in-depth tutorial below because this video is lacking I realized. But once you have all your piping sewn then we're going to go on to the next step which is putting it on our tin can. So all we're going to do is take our tin can and if you're using it for a real potted plant make sure you have the holes in the bottom of the can. Otherwise we're just going to take the piping and we're going to twist it around the can. So I started by just attaching the piping to the rim of the tin can with hot glue and I used these gardening gloves that I got at the Dollar Tree just to avoid burning my hands with the hot glue because when every time you're using hot glue just make sure to be really careful that you don't burn yourself. It's super uncomfortable to do that and these gloves do help avoid burns. But once the top of the tin can was covered with the piping then I cut off the cording and just hot glued it in place. Once you've covered the rim of the tin can then you can go ahead and start hot gluing around the rest of the can and at the beginning I hot glued more of the piping into place but then once I got started with the piping, I mean with the hot gluing, I didn't continue to hot glue every loop around the can. I just did the beginning and secured the piping really well in place and then I just looped it around the rest of the can and then when I got to the bottom of the can then I start hot gluing it in place again. And so the middle of the can really wasn't hot glued into place it was just the beginning and the ending of the piping. So I hot glued it around the bottom portion of the can and once it was hot glued in place I just took my scissors and I cut off the piping at that point and I started separately with a separate piece of piping on the bottom of the can. For the piece of piping that I was going to use in the bottom of the can, I did trim off all the extra fabric before using it just to make it a nice tight loop on the bottom of the can. So I just trimmed off the sides of the fabric before I started. Then I hot glued the end of the piece of piping onto the center of the bottom of the can and just started to loop the piping around in a circle creating a circular loop on the bottom. And I did hot glue this really well into place so every couple centimeters I put hot glue and just hot glued it all the way around the can just so that the loop stayed nice and neat on the bottom of the can. And I really liked how this started looking it was super modern and cute and I had liked the shirt when I bought it and I loved the shirt as a planter as well. So I guess if you like a fabric in one form you'll probably like it in another form as well. So it turned out really cute I loved how this looked. Another way to do this without sewing is just to take the fabric and wrap it around the cording and you can just do a really tight wrap on the cording and you wouldn't even have to sew that piping at all. So if you're not a seamstress or don't sew then you could also just do the same project by wrapping fabric around the cording. But this turned out really cute I love it and you can see the final project here. And here it is once again with the little plant inside and this would also be cute like the other leather ones as a tool holder or pencil holder. It's super cute and versatile and I just love how this turned out. This next planter really uses the same concept as the mosaic planters it's just covering cans that have been spray painted with polka dot paper this time and these are really cute planters for succulents or other small plants. So I just started by priming my cans with a white primer and then I took this craft polka dot paper and just cut it down to the size of the can and then hot glued it in place. And these turn out so cute and here you have it a little succulent planter or pencil holder or whatever you want to use it for. A cute way to dress up a tin can you never would recognize the can and you can definitely embellish these however you want you could put if you use them for herbs you can put the little herb name on the outside of the can or you can tie in some twine with a little embellishment for spring. So many options so cute and so easy to make just a couple minutes and you'll have these cute little planters that you can use. And don't you just love polka dots these little planters are so cute and again so easy and inexpensive to make for spring. I wasn't sure what to call this next project so I just called it a fern planter but basically you are going to start with your tin can you're going to spray paint it with the white primer until you get a nice white can or you could also use a black can or any color really that you like. And I took these plastic ferns and ideally I would have used real ferns that have been flattened but since we're in the dead of winter right now this is all I could get and so I started by just lining those ferns up along the tin can and if it was a real fern you could just use the dishwasher safe mod podge and put it directly on the can but since these are a little bit thicker I hot glued them in place around the can. Then to make the ferns stay even flatter I did use the dishwasher safe mod podge and just covered the ferns with the mod podge. I was thinking while I was making the project you could also use contact paper or some sort of vinyl to hold down the ferns but I used this mod podge which works pretty well it would work even better if these were real ferns and just helping them to lie more flat on the can. Then I took some twine and just twisted it around the top of the can. I started with this really thick jute twine but I didn't like that as much and so I actually removed it and just attached regular twine around the top of the tin can. And here you can see the finished product with the twine on the top and the foliage on the so cute and fresh for spring. This last craft is also a repeat from my Christmas tin can crafts but just start with a 28 ounce tin can cover it with paper on the inside and outside of the can and if you will be using this can for real plants make sure to drill holes in the bottom of your can but since this planter was going to be used inside my house for a fake plant I did not drill holes but I covered it with the paper and then take your lace and you can use a variety of laces you can see here I'm using this chunky vintage lace to start and just cover the outside of the can with different types of laces just taking your hot glue gun and pressing down that lace in place.