October 31, 2016

How To Make Halloween Bottles and Jars


Making your own Halloween bottles and jars for decorations
 at a party or for a display in your home is fun and inexpensive.
For the most cost-effective bottles and jars, start saving glass
containers that you would normally throw away well in 
advance of Halloween (instead of buying them at a craft
store). Keep any lids or caps that you can also. 

You can also use glass containers (vases, etc.) 
that you already have.

Sometimes you can find premade labels for your
 Halloween bottles and jars at a craft store but you 
will get more variety and have more control over 
what the labels say by making them 
yourself or downloading them. 
I did not want gory or evil labels so I made my own labels at the Pic Monkey picture editing site.

There are lots of free printable labels for your bottles and
jars available on the internet. Of course you will need a
computer and printer to make these. Do a "search" on your
computer for "free printable Halloween labels". Pick the 
ones you like, download them to your computer and print
them. Primcats blog is one that I have used for labels.  

I don't have a color printer but the labels still look fine
even without the color that many of the printable labels
have "built in". 

If you don't have a color printer either, you can add some
color to your label by using parchment-colored paper. 

The blank lables on the left were printed on parchment-colored paper. The ones on the
right were printed on regular white copy paper. Both are from a non-color printer. 

You can also add more age to your labels by lightly 
brushing them with watered down paint. 

The easiest Halloween bottles to make are the ones where
you just add water and then drop in some food coloring.
If I glue the label before adding water, sometimes I have
gotten water on the label (not a good thing). So if your
container will have water in it, consider if you want to
glue on the label before or after adding water. 

One of the coolest things to watch when making these
bottles is to see the food color drift into the water. 


You don't have to make your bottles and jars look old but if 
you like that look it is easy to do. The Kim Six Fix blog has 
some good ideas on aging glass bottles and jars using paint
and sandpaper that I have tried. 
You can also paint the lids of jars at the same time you are distressing glass. 

Get lots of water and just a little acrylic paint on a brush.
Dab it on a paper towel then brush onto the glass jar in 
 random or cross hatch strokes. 

If you are going to just add colored water and a label to
 distressed jars, you can go heavy on the distressing. The
distressing makes the glass hard to see through.

 I had some bottles and jars that I was putting things in 
that I wanted the contents inside to be seen. 
It was easy to back off of the distressing of the containers that
 I wanted to be mostly see through by dabbing off
some of the watered down acrylic paint with wet saran wrap
and paper towels.
Ignore that orange paint in the middle of  the table. I was painting faded fake pumpkins too. 

 Kim Six suggests sandpapering the glass and that cannot
 be undone so keep that in mind. The sandpapering 
cuts down on visibility too. 

My "find" that I wanted to be seen in the jars was plastic
bugs from Dollar Tree. They were great shapes but not so
great colors for an elegant Halloween display so I spray
painted them all flat black. 


The snakes and grasshoppers went in their jars easily.
When I put these creepy crawlers in their jars initially all 
of the legs and tentacles were lost visually because they
were all elegantly black.

To keep them up against the sides of the jars so they could
be seen, I used water beads in the center of the jars.
These little clear balls swell up 100 percent when soaked in water. They are in the floral aisle of craft stores. 

The cute lizards were too small to use the water beads so
I hot glued them to the sides of the jar.

Here are the plastic bugs, etc. in their jars. 


Keep your eyes open for creative things to put in your jars.
I found a pack of plastic bony hands on sale. They became
the contents for three jars. 


Here are some photos with the see through bottles and jars...


If you don't want to worry with putting anything in the jars
and bottles, paint them a solid color and add a label!
That's how many Halloween decorative containers that you purchase already made at stores come. 

To get solid colored bottles Halloween bottles just spray
paint bottles you have gotten the labels off of.
I like to separate the bottles out when spray painting them so I can get to all sides easily. 

These  bottles were painted with a flat black spray paint
 and then had labels glued onto them.
This is an idea that I am kopy katting from Brian Patrick Flynn. The link to the actual project
is gone from where I saw it on HGTV website but here is his website.

The framed poster in the above photo is from a Halloween project I did in the past called "Aging Paper".

To see more photos of how I used the Halloween 
bottles and jars click on over to 
"Halloween Dining Room Tour".

If you are interested in seeing another Halloween display
using bottles and jars I did a few years ago, please click
"Black Birds Of A Feather Flock Together"


Halloween Dining Room Tour


Happy Halloween!
Come on in to tour my dining room decorated just for you!

We'll start the tour with my French boy statue who stands 
between the living room and dining room usually. 

Sometimes he gets decorated himself. Right now 
he is a snake handler. 
With the French boy are bugs "en cloche" and a glassed-in dried flower arrangement I found
at a thrift store. I thought it looked like something in an old botanist lab. 

Here is the dining room table with some mildly spooky (but
not gory or evil) concotions and specimens.

A vine and a skeleton have found their way into the chandy.

All kinds of critters have decided to decorate 
the normally sedate white urn for Halloween.

A tiny dot of hot glue holds the painted black critters in place for now. 

No chance of us running out of snake bite antidote, spider
venom, love potion, squid ink or witch hazel this year. 






On the back side of the table are more specimens and potions.



While most of the items on the table were concocted at 
home, most of the items in the glassed-in hutch were purchased.

I'm going to open the doors so you can see inside.
The glare on the glass in photos can make it hard to see.




If you will kindly turn back towards the snake-handler
you will see another Halloween bottle display on the buffet.

These bottles held different kinds of libations in their former
life but now they have been spray painted flat black.

New (but old-looking) labels adorn these elegant bottles.



If you would like to see how all of the bottles and
jars were made for the displays, please visit my

Thanks for your Halloween visit! 


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