Make a Flower Vase from Recycled Bottles

It has been a while since I actually did this project.  It was in the middle of summer and I was trying out painting on lots of different things.  I saw a post on Pinterest where someone had turned a glass bottle into a vase by using a hot glue gun and paint.  I thought I'd give it a try.  This project did not turn out perfectly, so I'm not expecting a lot of OOHS and AHHHHS, but I'm hoping that someone else will see this idea and be able to create something WONDERFUL! 

MATERIALS
Empty and Clean Glass bottles: I used a salad dressing bottle and an olive oil bottle
Hot glue gun
Acrylic Paint (maybe a paint for glass would have been a better choice...I was trying to use what I had on hand)
Chalkboard Spray Paint
Paint Brushes

I did not take a picture of the olive oil bottle at the beginning of this project so many of these pictures may seem out of order.  I was just playing around and finally realized that this might be a project worth sharing.

 

The first step would be to actually write or draw on the bare glass using the hot glue gun.  You can see in the picture above what the glue looks like once it dries.   This is actually really easy and it dries super fast.  The lesson I learned is that you need to make sure you remove the glue 'threads' that are left every time you lift up the gun.  Try to use an x-acto knife and clean up the edges of your words or picture.  UNLESS, you are going for the 'spooky' look.  Which, since Halloween is quickly approaching, you might like that look.  I wasn't really going for that here.  

On the bottle below you can see where I drew a flower.  (Again, I did not take pictures of the next few steps.)  Once the glue was dried I tried just painting the flower yellow, to see what it would like.  It was okay, but not nice enough for me.  I then decided to spray the can with chalkboard paint.  I had seen where people have painted glass with the chalkboard paint and then used acrylic paint on top so I decided to go this route. 

 It actually looked really neat with just the black, so I thought I would try to paint the flower again with yellow and see what that looked like.  I also noticed that if I scratched the inside of the flower petals it looked really neat b/c you could kind of see inside the bottle.  You can see that in the picture below.

I then decided to paint the entire bottle yellow.  The picture below is of a different bottle, but the procedure is the same. 

This particular bottle just did not turn out like I had hoped.  If you look closely you can see those 'spooky' looking strings I was telling you about.  I finally just tossed this poor little guy. 

 Back to the olive oil bottle...

I THEN decided that I did not like the 'all yellow' look and decided to give it a coat of white spray paint.  I went over the flower and the words one last time with the yellow paint and I was almost satisfied.

The final step was to paint the lip of the bottle yellow. 

So, like I said in the beginning, this was mainly an experiment.  I really like the idea that you can write with hot glue on glass and then paint the hot glue!  I have not had any more time to play with this idea, but I think there are some possibilities out there.  Maybe this is an old idea and I am late to the party?  Have any of you tried this before?

One other note.  This is a GREAT KID'S CRAFT.  I took a pickle jar and wrote the word THREADS on it and let my daughter paint the letters.  She painted each letter a different color and had fun doing it.  

Anyway, I am enjoying using my new vase to hold all my beautiful Zinnias growing in my back yard this year! 

Thanks for stopping by!

Blessings,
Gina