My latest project – my tattooed trug – makes me a (possibly the only) tattoo artist with a canvas of wood…
For Christmas last year, my Mom gave me a beautiful trug for harvesting things in my garden. I posted about it previously, when I quickly gave it a weathered look – for all those details, check out that post here.
After trying out my wood burning pen (again, for more details, check out this post), I decided I wanted to jazz the trug up a little more.
Let’s Start at the beginning…
What is a trug?
So, like I said, I was given this beautiful handmade pristine trug. It was so perfectly clean I was almost afraid to use it…what if a bird pecked tomato leaked in it? The horror!
So In January (when there wasn’t much to do in the garden, yet, I weathered it. I simply used water, black acrylic paint, and a spray bottle.
I made a YouTube video about the whole process-
Never Enough
I was really pleased with the weathering, it made it look like I’d had it a while and that it had carried bushels of garden goodness into the kitchen, but I felt like it was missing something.
After completing my first wood burning project, I got the idea to use that technique on the trug too. The difficult part then was deciding what to burn into the sides.
I had thought perhaps the lyrics to a garden/plant/herb song… “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” by Edison Lighthouse, or the old hymn “In the Garden”. But they both seemed a tad too serious for this project.
I have always been a lover of puns, riddles, knock-knock jokes, and “dad jokes”. When my brain put two and two together, I knew garden/plant related puns was just what it needed.
I looked up a bunch of puns, and then set them in different fonts. I printed them out, used my lightbox (but a window works just as well) to trace the words with pencil onto the backside of the paper I had printed them on. (This creates a carbon copy.) I then scribbled on the front of the printed text when I had it lined up where I wanted to transfer the text onto the side slats of the trug.
After I had a row of puns copied onto a slat, I plugged in the wood burning pen and started tracing over the transferred words. Then repeated the process until all eight side slats were “tattooed” on my trug.
I’m very pleased with the end result. Each of the puns makes me smile.
VIDEO
The top of the handle looked a little naked compared to the sides, so I decided to add Ecclesiastes 3:2 “a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which was planted” across the top. I think that is pretty perfect, because I see it (with a colorful background of cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, beans, peas, and herbs) every time I pick up my trug to cart my harvest inside.
When I had told my mom about my idea to “tattoo” my trug, I could tell by the look in her eyes that she thought it was a horrible idea. She was not discouraging though, she simply said, “It’s your trug, you can do whatever you want to it.”
She saw it last weekend and told me the whole truth… “When you first told me you were going to burn stuff into it I thought it would be awful, but now that it is all done, it looks really good.”
If you have a love for puns and have a garden related project you’d like to incorporate puns into, below I have attached the puns I used for this project for you to download for free.
Let me know what you think of how it turned out in the comments below…
What are some of your favorite puns?
This is such a fun way to personalize your trug. What a cute idea!