Easy DIY Santa Basket

I just love the versatility of these rustic apple harvest baskets. You can use them for storage, for home decorations, and even gift baskets.

I purchased them from a local place in Pigeon Forge called The Apple Barn, but you can find similar ones on Amazon.

The first thing I did was to spray paint the basket in a bright red. As you can see here I was also working on another project at the same time as usual.

When you have a warm day in November in East TN you take advantage of it and work on multiple projects at the same time, especially if they are both getting the same paint color.

And to be honest, I got so busy working on these projects that I forgot to take a picture of the spray painting process, but I am sure you can figure that part out.

I used Rustoleum Apple Red Spray Paint in Gloss.

Since the wood of the basket is so porous, it took two coats of spray paint to cover the outside and inside of the basket.

I really wanted a real belt for Santa's suit for the basket but struggled to find a small one at the thrift stores with the right look.

Thankfully the basket had a small wood strip around the diameter of the basket that I could very easily paint black for the belt using acrylic paints.

I also used white acrylic paint to create a white band around the top of the basket and one vertical wood strip down the front for the buttons on the Santa suit.

Santa's suit must have shiny black buttons so I created the look of those by tracing the outline of a quarter on the white vertical section of the basket for three buttons. Then I filled them in with black acrylic paint the same as the belt.

I added the details of the gold belt buckle and the gold thread for the buttons using an acrylic metallic gold paint.

The final step was to give the basket a bit of festive glitter. Using Sparkle Mod Podge, I painted over all of the white sections of the paint Santa Basket with two layers of Mod Podge to achieve just a little bit of holiday sparkle for the basket.

This year I have red and white poinsettias displayed in this adorable Santa basket, but next year it may be something different. The possibilities are endless and so are the uses for this basket.