If you are a "thrifter", garage-sale frequenter, or flea-market fiend, one of the most common items you'll come across are glass bottles and jars, both vintage and newer. You can rescue a group of these beauties from the recycling process or, heaven forbid, from the trash, by "up-cycling" them using decoupage and simple embellishments.
The group of vintage bottles below came from an antique mall, and were all priced at $1.00 to $3.00 each:
With just basic decoupage technique, colored water, and ribbon, I was able to transform my antique-mall bottles into these colorful examples:
I recently wrote a guest blogger post for Mod Podge Rocks, where I showed readers "How to Rock Some Bottles and Jars with Mod Podge". For the Mod Podge project, I used the bottles and jars below:
Here are a few of the completed bottles:
I selected all three of the labels above from The Graphics Fairy, a fabulous resource for graphic images. If you click on "Advertising" and "Labels" on the sidebar, you'll have lots of great vintage designs just a click away. Print them out, resize them if needed, and age them around the edges with some ink such as Tim Hotz Distress Ink. That way, the white edges won't distract from the label once on the bottle.
The largest bottle was a perfect holder for a gathering of peacock feathers, which pick up the green color scheme I have going on. A little ribbon and some millinery blossoms look at home in my Sigault bottle, and my vintage apothecary jar looks interesting with a collection of green thread spools:
Everything I needed for the project is pictured below, except for the embellishments such as ribbons and millinery flowers. Here we have a brayer; Mod Podge; Distress Ink for making your labels look authentically stained and old; a foam brush, and of course the labels:
Another grouping of finished bottles:
The advertising I selected to serve as "labels" for these amber bottles makes a bit of an optical illusion, but I thought they were interesting nonetheless.
An lastly, I used a copy of an old coffee bag, trimmed it down, and used it for this large glass canister that I filled with......coffee beans!
Here are a few suggested variations on this project:
Create your own labels using pictures of your family or even pets, combined with some interesting graphics, and use them on empty wine bottles.
There are many great images you can copy from vintage postcards.
Look though an old magazine from the 1950's for some cool mid-century ads that could be scanned into your computer, modified, then printed out for bottle labels.
One more tip: If you want to fill your bottles with colored water, use food coloring and corks that can be purchased in little bags of assorted sizes at a craft store, if your bottles don't have a cap. I got my corks at JoAnn Fabrics. You can even age the corks a bit with Distress Ink so they don't look "raw", as new cork will look.
Happy Crafting,
Mitzi
