How to Make a Mosaic Flower Pot

Start with plain terracotta pots. Chrissy seals the inside and outside of each pot with a clay pot sealer first, which helps the finished piece hold up outdoors. Pull together the rest of your supplies while that dries: a plate you love, tile nippers, gloves, and safety goggles. She grabbed a blue and white plate at her local thrift store and knew right away it would make a pretty pot.

Put your safety goggles and gloves on before you break anything. Take your tile nippers and start snapping the plate into smaller pieces. Chrissy works inside a cardboard box so the shards stay contained, because it gets messy as the pieces get smaller. If you'd rather keep it fully sealed off, drop the plate in a ziploc bag and break it inside the bag.

Keep nipping until your pieces land around half an inch to three-quarters of an inch. That size lays flat on a small pot and grouts cleanly. Chrissy mixed in a second plate she found at Goodwill for a couple of dollars, though she notes a curved salad plate is harder to cut than a flatter dinner plate. Experiment with different plates and pot sizes to see what you like.

Now the design comes together. Spread tile adhesive on the pot and press your pieces on in a pattern. Chrissy scales her tile sizes to the pot, so for these small pots she sticks with the half-inch to three-quarter-inch pieces. She sets square tiles around the rim as a border, then fills the body in a random pattern. If she did it again, she'd measure the rim first and space the border tiles a little closer together.

Let the adhesive set for about five or six hours, then mix your grout. Chrissy stirs powdered grout with water until it hits a consistency like toothpaste. Her one big piece of advice: make more grout than you think you'll need. You do not want to run out halfway through a pot and have to mix a fresh batch that doesn't match.

Work the grout over the entire pot with gloved hands, pushing it into every crack and crevice between the tiles. Do not panic when the whole thing disappears under a layer of grout. It looks like a mess at this stage and that is exactly right. The gaps have to be packed full for the mosaic to hold together and look finished.

This is where it gets pretty. Take a sponge that's just barely damp and scrape the grout off the faces of the tiles. The pattern appears as you go, and the colors pop back through the haze. Rinse and wring your sponge often so you're not smearing grout back onto the tiles you already cleaned.

Let the pot cure overnight so the grout sets before you touch it. The next day, buff it with a clean damp cloth to clear any last grout haze. Chrissy also seals the grout with a mosaic tile sealer, which isn't required but helps the pot last longer outside. Then plant your flowers and set it out on the patio. That thrift-store plate is now a planter no one else has.