Altered Bottles

 

I don't know about you but I am a hoarder of bottles and jars of interesting shapes and sizes and decided it was a time I made a dint in the pile so that I could fill my Candy Cart from a next blog post with something decorative but still functional. 

The process for all of these items is the same. Firstly you need to clean the jars throughly and degrease the outside with alcohol  - hand sanitizer with do the trick and I am sure we all have plenty of that at home. Once cleaned I then applied bonding primer and let it dry. You will find it is better to use two layers - paint with a brush the first layer, let dry thoroughly and then dabb on the second layer and dry again.

Once prepped the bottles can be altered in lots of ways. I knew that I wanted to add rice papers to most of the jars and they are definitely best applied over a pale surface so the true colour shows. So I took my jars and added co-ordinating paint from Pentart over the jars and once dry applied white crackle paste varrying the thickness to get different sized cracks and giving me the white surface to add the rice papers too. To adhere the rice papers I used decoupage glue - mod podge or watered down PVA will work too. Once the images had dried in place I added splatters of paint to co-ordinate with the images.

 The rice papers I used were everyday a fresh start for the purple flowers and mantel clock image.

For the pink flowers I used the bouquet of roses rice paper.

For the last jar I actually used  paper from the Rose Parfume paper pad wrapping it around the center of the jar and adding the words which were fussy cut out.

My issue with using jars and bottles is how to disguise the thread for the lid which I did not want to use. My way of solving this was to wind string around the tops and secure in place before adding co-ordinating shabby ribbons and then some silk flowers that went with the papers though I am thinking that the new fabric flowers would work just as well.

I do hope you have enojoyed reading this and it encourages you to use the products in your stash and upcycle some of the jars we all have instead of throwing them in the bin.