Dare to DIY: Christmas Vases

I'm finally joining in one of Kim's Dare to DIY parties @ Newly Woodwards! This week, it's Dare to Deck the Halls... and I had the perfect project in mind.

So, ever since I joined Pinterest, I’ve been a pinning maniac. There are so many amazing DIY projects that I want to try, but I don’t even know where to start. Over the long Thanksgiving break, I was getting a little bored and decided I needed a Christmas project pick-me-up. So I turned to my Pinterest boards and this pin in particular:

via BadderHomesandGardens.com

Hot glue, a wine bottle, and spray paint? It seemed super-easy and super-cheap (read: right up my alley). So I headed to Hobby Lobby to get three glass “wine bottles” ($1.50 each at 50% off). Since I wanted to use my bottles as vases, I also bought some frosted Christmas berries (64 cents each at 50% off).

Then I started thinking that while I was there, I should probably look for a back-up plan in case my hot glue words didn’t look so…well, hot. In the sticker aisle, I found some glittery foam letters for $4.99 (full price). They’re actually called "Thickers" – clever, right?

American Crafts Thickers Glitter Foam Letter Stickers, Fancy Black 

Back at home, with glue gun in hand, I was ready to write some Christmas sentiments on these bottles (I chose Love, Peace, and Joy). I started with the word “Love” first.

Let's not sugar-coat things - it looked like it was written by a third-grader. (No offense to any third-graders out there.) My hand was obviously not steady enough to do this with the glue gun, and I’m really impressed with the one that looked so nice on Pinterest. I didn’t even bother trying the other two words. Accepting my failure, I turned immediately to the back-up stickers.

The glue letters peeled right off, and I proceeded to adhere the stickers to the bottles instead. Much better. I was actually kind of digging it just like this, but I wasn’t going to let myself off that easy. (And frankly, I was just really itching to paint something.)

At first I thought about doing each bottle in a different color, then decided to keep it simple (and cheaper) with all white, which would look nice with the red berries. Since I had never spray painted glass before, I decided to buy the Krylon Fusion, which is specifically for slick surfaces like plastic, glass, etc. (Krylon K02320000 Fusion For Plastic Aerosol Spray Paint, 12-Ounce, Gloss White). 

I put one of the bottles in a big cardboard box in the backyard, so I could spray all the way around it and try to keep the over-spray to a minimum (since I have been known to be a little careless with my spray paint in the past).

After a couple coats, I could tell that the white paint was not going to cover up the black stickers very well. Drat. I didn’t remember seeing any white stickers like this at Hobby Lobby, and I didn’t have the patience to paint 10 coats on each bottle just to try and make these stickers white.

Time for Plan B. (Or I guess Plan C by this point?) Since I did actually like the stickers as they were – black and glittery – I decided to just paint the entire bottle white and add the stickers afterward for a contrasting effect instead of a subtle effect.

Each bottle still needed about 3 coats of paint to get solid coverage, which was already stretching the limits of my patience. But finally they were all Satin White and wonderful!

Once the paint was almost dry, I put on the sticker letters. Loving it!

The final touch was to add a berry pick in each one. And here are my Christmas vases on top of the piano (aka my "mantle"):

Even though they didn’t turn out exactly like the ones I saw on Pinterest, I really like my version! It would also be cute to use other short words or phrases, such as
 - ‘tis the season
- deck the halls
- peace on earth

You could even package the bottles up all nice and give them as a gift set. Oh, the possibilities!

The overall cost of this project (bottles, berry picks, stickers, and paint) was about $15, but I still have leftover paint and stickers to use for something else. So, have you done any Christmas crafting yet?

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