craft the pain away

completed: spray-painted trash

before

Somewhere on the Internet, I saw a spray-painted wine bottle. And I was determined to recreate it. Somewhere else on the Internet, I saw rubber bands used when spray-painting jars and such to create lines. I was determined to do that too.
So today, I rescued a wine bottle from the trash, cleaned it out throughly (getting labels off is a pain!), wrapped rubber bands around it haphazardly, and spray-painted it white. Ta-da! A totally free project!
This technique would also be fun with multiple coats of spray-paint in different colors!

after

I did find that there was a little bleeding under the rubber bands, especially where the bands crossed, and that when I took the rubber bands off, there were little ridges of excess paint on the bottle. These undesirable additions to my pretty bottle were easily removed with a little brushing action.

completed: paper flowers

flowers

in a new orange mason jar

To fill all the mason jars that I've been making, I made paper flowers. Paper flowers aren't quite as lovely as fresh flowers (and are considerably more work), but they won't wilt and don't need water. And since I constructed a whole bouquet for a few dollars (with the supplies to make many many more leftover), I would say paper flowers are also quite a bit less expensive.

I constructed these lovelies out of tissue paper and chenille stems. The "flowers" are colored around the edges with marker to look a little more realistic (and pretty). I did four pink flowers and two red flowers. To make the flowers, I followed this tutorial, which was very helpful.

The fake carnations remind me dyeing carnations with food coloring with my mother back in the day. Good times, good times.

top view

closeup

pretty

completed: more tinted mason jars

the good ones

the rejects

Last night I made more tinted mason jars after removing the previous not-so-successful coloring from two jars. Out of the six I made, four were successful and two were not. That's not an ideal success rate, but since it's pretty easy to remove the tinting (see my previous post for details), it's acceptable.

I used the same mixture and oven temperature as before but added more food coloring for more intense colors. I did four drops of red for the pink, four drops of red and three drops of blue for the purple, three drops of green and three drops of blue for the teal (both of them - the successful one and the reject), and three drops of yellow and two drops of red for the orange. The darker teal reject was four drops of green and four drops of blue.

I've thought long and hard about why two of the jars didn't work out. One of them was the exact same mixture as a successful jar, I used the same techniques on all the jars, and the jars were all in the oven for the same amount of time. I've concluded that the air-drying time is crucial. The two unsuccessful jars were the last to be done, and thus had the least amount of air-drying before going into the oven. Next time (oh yes, I will continue until I perfect this process), I will let all the jars air-dry for 30 minutes before going into the oven for 30 minutes.

For now, I am going to make something to put in the jars.