A little love and a lot of gloss paint

With a little love, care and a lot of gloss paint I turned my old, scruffy wooden candle holder into something fit for a living room. There are a few handy hints I picked up from my mum that I wanted to share. 

I started off with my old wooden bowl, which, over the years has become covered in wax from one to many candles blown out. As you can see from the picture below, it's in a pretty bad state and as I hovered with it over the bin I thought, wait!, I can probably do something with this...

My mum introduced me to 'Stain Stop'. An absolute godsend when decorating, stain stop can be sprayed on to anything you want to paint to cover up any greasy marks (very good for kitchen walls!). In this case I scraped off as much candle wax as I could and sprayed some over the top to stop the wax showing through. 

Using quite a thick brush I painted white gloss paint over the top, using a smaller brush to get in the nooks and crannies and giving it a second coat here and there. I left to dry and popped some candles in and it's like having a new candle holder!