Homemade Painted Flower Pots

Celebrate Mother’s Day or any special occasion with a heartfelt, handmade gift! Painting and decorating flowerpots is a simple, creative, hands-on activity that elementary-aged kids will love. Plant vibrant flowers for a personalized touch that blooms with love and pride. This simple, personal project makes the perfect keepsake for moms, grandmas and every loved one!

Terra cotta pot with red hearts and green dots painted on it planted with live yellow and red flowers on a wooden table

In years past for Mother’s Day, I leaned on an old faithful, painted flower pots. But this year our eldest grandson and I worked on a special house-warming gift for his other grandmother who loves plants.

Paint a Pot – Create a Keepsake Gift!

You can’t go wrong when you take a little time to jazz up a clay pot, add some daisies and throw in a bushel of love! All you need are a few basic acrylic paints, a pot and saucer (the saucer is optional), and some seeds (or plants if you’re in a real hurry!).

What You Will Need

In order to make these pots, you need some pretty basic materials:

Child's hand painting a terra cotta flower pot white with a brush

Create the Painted Pot

Paint the Pot

Start with covering the brown pot in white paint (or whatever color you want as the background color). Then let dry. We were recycling a mismatched pot and saucer so this step was super important.

Big strokes with a flat brush and the challenge of covering the entire pot somewhat evenly is great fine motor skills practice for kids. Because this part of the activity isn’t all that mentally challenging it’s a great time to talk about important stuff… like Star Wars, world economics and if dragons really exist! Your kiddo may have different topics in mind, of course!

White flower pot on a wooden table with a child's hand brushing paint on a heart-shaped sponge stamp

Decorate the pot and saucer using sponges and paint!

Sponge stamps make decorating a whole lot easier for little folks, but even older kiddos will enjoy blending colors before stamping. I cut the shapes out of cheap kitchen sponges but you can buy them if you wish.

We experimented with repeating designs and layering design elements on paper first so we could pick which we liked best before committing.

To “blend” the colors paint them on the sponge before pressing it onto the pot. As pressure is applied the colors sort of squish together and automatically “blend”

We had large and small hearts, dots and leaves to chose from for our designs. I used some of the sponge scraps to make some straight and curved lines too when it seemed like we were going to need them. Then we watched Encanto and suddenly needed a large heart with heart shaped hole in it! Go figure.

When all the painting was finished to the grandson’s satisfaction and thoroughly dried we sprayed it with a nice clear coat to protect the paint.

Add the Plant

All that was left at this point was to fill the pot with potting soil and either seeds or a plant. We opted to go the plant route … because I am not the grandmother with green thumbs!

We added a nice housewarming card that he made and added a ribbon because how do you know it’s a gift if it doesn’t have a bow??

His “green thumb” grandma loved it!