Painting Wooden Candlesticks: Turning a Thrift Store Buy Into Whimsical Decor

Learn a few tricks about painting wooden candlesticks that you can find at a thrift store and turn them into beautiful and whimsical home decor.

We always go thrift, and antique shopping on our girls weekend, and this year one of my purchases was an old wooden spool. I thought it would be perfect to set a pillar candle on. Soon after, I found a pair of wooden candle sticks.They were only $3.99 for the pair, and I thought they would go great with the spool. So I set out to create a whimsical trio by painting wooden candlesticks in a variety of bright colors.

Painting Wooden Candlesticks

I was inspired by all the colorful Easter eggs I’m seeing all over the internet. The Easter eggs also made me think of Mary Engelbreit designs from the 90’s. 

Here are the original wooden candlesticks and the spool that I purchased. They were pretty cute on their own, but not as bright as I wanted, and I also wanted them to coordinate well together.

To start this project, simply give the wood a light sanding.

Then give them a base coat of white paint. I used some chalk paint that I had on hand, but any kind would work. This is only one coat and I ended up painting them with a second coat for good coverage. The white paint will help with coverage especially with lighter colors. And, you can leave some parts white as part of the design.

Since the spool was nice and straight I attempted to use some painters tape to section off different areas.

However, as you can see some of it bled through the tape.  😐 

This flat brush was a nice tool for painting bands of paint and dash marks.

Use the top of a pencil eraser to make circles or dots. I found that it works best if you take the time to dip the eraser in the paint for each dot, instead of trying to get two or more dots per dip.

The same holds for these paint brush handles. You can use different sizes and dip them into paint to create dots on the candlesticks.

The last tip I have is using sharpies for definition. I used a black sharpie pen to add a little definition between colors.

Painting wooden candlesticks is a wonderful, creative activity.

This would be a great project to make with a group of friends or kids.

If you don’t have any laying around and don’t thrift shop you can buy affordable unfinished candlesticks online like these candlesticks from amazon.

You can also protect the candlesticks with spray polyurethane to protect the finish, however, I did not. I think if I was giving them as a gift I would finish them with a protective coating, but since they are just for our house I’m going to leave them just the way they are.