Altered Pate Dish

Completed Dish

I seem to have collected a few empty pate dishes (really excellent stuff from CostCo!) which I’ve been keeping because I was sure there’d be something I could do with them!

When I recently bought some flavoured tea bags (Lemon & Ginger etc) I decided not to store them out of sight in a cupboard but to have them in plain view so I would actually drink them now and again. They are all individually wrapped so won’t go stale exposed to the air.

Planning

Then I realised that I couldn’t have them sitting in a plain dish – not in my kitchen and so took a couple up to my craft room to play with. You can see what the original looked like below (and you may spot a few holes – I was wondering if I could add brads or eyelets and Crop-a-Dile said yes!!) and then how it was when I’d given it a coat of gesso. I only have white gesso so I added some red and some green and came up with this strange base colour (which looks very pink on some photos!).

I dug out some images I liked, some co-ordinating papers, a couple of die-cuts I’d just practised cutting out and a rhino (this is a nod to Twinings whose teabags I generally use, it came from one of their boxes).

Basic Pate Dish

Gessoed

Choices

Step 2

I ripped various papers into small pieces and cut out the printed images and then just glued them here and there all over the dish using pva glue. Got to say that it doesn’t look too exciting at the moment – I did think that maybe I shouldn’t have bothered photographing it as it wouldn’t be fit to share with anyone!

Twinings Rhino

One side

Black flourish

Leafy end

Spot the rhino

Other end

Step 3

The base colour does look very strange on these piccies, it really isn’t pink, more beigey….anyhow, I like a bit of sparkle so I sponged all over the dish and the images with some gold decor paint. You can see on the close-ups above that the pva pulled off some of the gesso but this sponging seemed to cover it.

Sponged

Rhino sponged

One end

Step 4

I had made a bit of mess of the top rim with the gesso, it wasn’t very neat and some had flaked off with handling so I got out my gold acrylic paint, put some in a little dish and sponged around the top edge and into the inside of the dish. I think this looks very rich, although it won’t really be seen much when it’s full of tea.

I guess I got a little carried away then and went over all the outside of the dish with the same gold paint, you really can’t see much of the beigey/pink gesso anymore but that’s fine, I love gold!

I have given the whole lot a couple of coats of watered pva and will do a couple more before I put it in use – hope you like what I did with something so boring.

There are several views of the inside and out of the finished dish below, it’s amazing what the different lighting does to colours.

Inside

view1

view1a

view2

view2a

one end

other end