April Showers Bring May Flowers but DO NOT try to spray paint your umbrellas

At Good Juju, I want to make use of ALL my space, floor to ceiling.  My plan is to hang various items  up high to make seasonal displays.  For Spring, I decided to go with umbrellas.

My first thought was to spray paint used umbrellas and add greenery.

Well…

After going through two cans of spray paint that ended up runny, not covering up the underlying color, and just looking like a drippy, blotchy, poorly done mess- I soon discovered how bad that idea was.  

Umbrellas seem to be made of a material that repels liquids.

Who’d have thought of that?

Well, I was trying to be thrifty about it and was happy to get free umbrellas from a friend, but do you know how much spray paint costs?  That was not going to be a cheap way to do it.

After looking on Amazon and other places and seeing that affordability was not going to be applicable to this project, I almost gave up the idea.  Then, I found five, white paper umbrellas at a thrift store for a couple bucks each!  

So, I started looking for fake white roses and greenery, and was attacked again by sticker shock.  I once again was about to give up on my plan.  Then friends brought me grocery bags of flowers they’d gotten at estate sales and didn’t need.

Plan April Showers was back on track!

I was also given a naked, vintage umbrella in bits and pieces.  The handle was so pretty, I just had to put the thing back together.

So the skeleton was rebuilt with duct tape, wire, and string.  It will never open and close, but none of this set does after adding the flowers to them.

The one with the great handle was so nice, I thought it deserved vintage florals and pretty fabric, so I spent a lot of time on it, as well as plucking an entire rose covered hat to finish it with.

Sadly, I was careless with my glue and when you hold it up to the light, you can see the clear blobs of dried glue on the transparent fabric. 

None of the results are anything like my plans. I was going to take down the stained glass window, and have just greens in white umbrellas hanging.  But since that didn’t work out and I went with what was available, I think I like the colorful display even more!