I found some great knobs on sale at a second hand store for $.50 so I bought them to dress up some of the corks on our potion bottles.
I cut the corks down if needed as I didn't want to have the cork showing at the top of the bottles.
You can see here that the cork is a bit big so by cutting the top off using a knife, I was able to make it fit into the jar but large enough to go into the jar.
Once it is cut to size, take the screw and put it through the bottom of the cork and if you push as you turn it, you will be able to get it worked through the cork and screw it into the knobs.
There are many different types of knobs you can use, even the plain ones can be painted and decorated.
I used a screwdriver to screw it into the cork.
Then screw the knob on and it will look something like this.
I also wanted to show you how I made the spider web and spiders bottle as I thought it looked cute.
Get some of the fake spider web and use the shish-kabob skewer to push it down into the bottle but keep one corner out of the bottle to hook into the cork edge so that the spiders web will stay at the top and not just sit at the bottom.
Push some spiders down into the web once it is into the jar.
You can add flies, worms, snakes, ants or roaches if you want but I really liked the black widow spiders.
Some were rings. I used the wire snips to cut off the ring portion and shoved them down into the jar.
When we were putting jewelry on the jars, Princess took some in and was putting them on different jars and I was glad she was excited about making them cute.
I found these little little crystals that I thought would be great for some of the outside charms as well.
Princess and her friend worked on a few jars and had to leave so I finished putting jewelry on them.
She wanted them gold so we used more gold jewelry and I put some jewelry on top of the corks as well.
I also wanted to show you how the sponge mushrooms looked inside a jar. They kind of looked like brains.
I also wanted to show you the light bulb jars I found. The bigger one has two bags of candy corn in them and still is about half full so it is quite large.
I also wanted to show you this cute jar my friend bought that has silver wound around the top of the jar, a crystal topper and a cute label saying "Witch Hazel" etc on it. It didn't have anything in it but was swished with some paint inside. I thought it was similar to what we did but I'm excited about the different sized jars. Now, I just need to make some cute labels.
When I started collecting the little jars for Princess Five, I didn't think it would turn into such a big project. However, it really has turned into something fun and cute.
I still need to show a few things more that are cute ideas but today, I wanted to show you how to use old jewelry to decorate the jars.
I have two bags of "recycle" jewelry that I have and every time I buy a "bag" of jewelry at the second hand store, I bag anything that isn't something we want but is in good condition or is new, and give it to charity in several ways. Click here for a post about that and it has other links explaining more as well.
Here is a link where I talk about giving the jewelry away at Christmas to the old folk center.
I took the recycle jewelry bag and looked through them (one has gold items and the other silver) to see if there was anything I could use to decorate the jars and make them cute.
The jewelry in them is maybe silver plate and has worn off so that the copper is showing through. No one would wear the jewelry but for a decoration on a jar used to decorate for one holiday, it would be perfect.
I also found some cute cross buttons that were fifty cents at a second hand store that someone purchase on clearance from Hobby Lobby. I figured ten cents each for them is a good deal and they match the weapon hanging on the wall.
I found this cute heart bracelet and was able to use the tin snips to cut links and measure it to fit around the neck of a bottle and then added the other charms to other chains to other jars.
You can use almost anything including sparkly string and just glue it around the neck of the jar wrapping it around until it is as wide as you would like it to be.
You can use the gold elastic that you get on gift boxes at Christmas and just tie a knot at the back of the jar and lace a charm or something through it.
Most of the jewelry was "free" since it was from bags that I bought to get other things out of. The jars were mostly about $1 and some dollar stores have cute jars. Antique stores have some great antique medicine jars that would be super cute.
Right now, one second hand store in town has some great jars. Some still have powder residue in them.
You can put an add out on a local newspaper, internet site asking for old medicine jars or even cute little Tabasco jars etc. People love to recycle and hate to throw things like that out if someone can use them. Ebay or other sites sell them cheap but usually the shipping makes them more.
Old town dumps or farm garbage pits have old jars that you can dig up or along old railway tracks, you can sometimes find old jars.
You can then make the little jars into whatever you want by adding tops, corks, jewelry, filling and labels.
I found this rubber bat in my decorations and thought how much fun it would be to hang on the outside and make a label of "crystallized bats blood" for the red sand inside.
I just used metal jump rings and didn't put them through the bat but just clamped them down on it firm enough for it to hold the bat up on the chain.
On the "snake" jar, I just wrapped a gold chain around the top and Princess Five said that was her favorite. She liked that it was "gold" in color as I used silver on most of the others. I still have many jars that need decorating as I am making a set for Princess Five and myself.
She has helped and I told her she could have her pick of whatever she wanted and I would keep the rest as I am getting rid of all the old stuff I have.
To be continued....
I bought all these packages at the dollar store to put into the jars. I bought black and multicolored glow in the dark snakes and one larger glow yellowish "grow" glow snake.
I figured we could either put the "growing" bigger yellowish glow snake in a glass jar with a bit of colored water and have it like that, or I could put the big snake in with the little black snakes together or all three types together.
I ended up putting the larger one with the black ones in a bigger jar. I decided not to use the multicolored lizards or snakes just so it looked more authentic.
I did like the centipedes and cockroaches as they both looked somewhat authentic and I put them into different jars.
I bought these glow dinasour bones thinking they would be great as "rat or bat bones."
I decided that I could use all the parts even the edges to fill up the jar more as I don't know that any really look like animal bones so I used tin snips to cut the edges into small pieces and stuck them into the jars as well.
Princess Four while home last weekend actually put one of the dinosaurs together and it took her quite a long time.
I did buy two little kits but after cutting up the edges of the two and the jar was a smaller jar, I just ended up using one.
I shared before how I used colored sand to fill some of the jars for girls camp "potions" for our Snow White theme. Click here for that post.
I had enough jars as both Princess Five and I both wanted to have "Potion Jars" for decorating for Halloween that I needed a bit more colored sand. We thought again about using Jello but I figured I would "find" some as I always seem to get what I want and find it soon after desiring it.
I went to a second hand store this week and guess what they had? Yep, lots of colored sand. They had it at $1.50 for each bottle and they were not full so I asked about it and they marked them at $.75 for me so I was able to get more for cheap.
This actually is more like colored sugar as it is much larger pieces of "sand" than the others I used but still is great for what we are planning.
Since jars are all different sizes, I used my graduated funnel set and used it to pour the sand into the jars. For the most part, I only used the sand on the narrow necked jars as I wanted to use the other jars with wider necks for bugs etc.
Some tools needed to make the tops fit, fill the jars and to push things down or pull things out of jars was a metal shish-kabob skewer, a knife and funnels.
I don't want to make these posts extremely long as there are lots of pictures so I can't get ahead of myself but I pulled out my Halloween decorations and had to pull spiders, flies, little spiders, and ants out of fake spiders webs so I could use them in some jars as well. Tomorrow, I will add pictures of those. I think the sand looks great in this long neck jar. So fun to be able to create all these things. Finding the jars at second hand stores has also been fun. To be continued.....
I was going to post this in three different ways. I was going to do the first day, the jars and tops, the second day, what to put inside the jars, day three, how to decorate the outside of the jars and day four, how to label the bottles or jars.
However, yesterday, I spent many hours making more jars and decorating them and putting more things in them and making more cute toppers and so I think I will just write about the pictures on this page and then tomorrow, post about the pictures I took yesterday and then do a third day when I make the labels for them.
I shared that I have been collecting fun an unusual jars for Princess Five to make a "potion" collection for Halloween.
Princess helped me decorate and then we started putting things into jars. I went to my craft room and pulled out anything that I thought would make a good "fill" for the jars.
I pulled out some fabric and silk flowers and we found these little berries on a vine so she cut them off and the little curly vine portions and she also found this little plastic bird egg in a nest I had so she pulled that out as well and put it into the melted jar that looks like a heart spoon.
It looks like you could use it like a pestle and mortar so the berries in that make it look cute.
I love how she added the heart and other body parts on her table as well.
She has a jar with bloody fingers in it. I bought them last year at the dollar store and went back to get a few more to fill up the jar and they didn't have any this year or if they did, I missed getting any.
I had some different colored grapes in small and medium from when we were in our "Oliver play" that we used as props. Click here to see a post about that. Anyway, she thought they would make great poison berries like in Hunger games "nightlock" berries so we pulled them off the little vines and put them in a clear fun warped jar and will label them soon.
We also got the body parts at the dollar store. They had heart, liver, brains and the fingers so that is fun.
We pulled off the green grapes and will say they are "Frog Eyes" so both of those were easy to fill as I had several different shades of each. I got most of them at the second hand store but also some at the dollar store.
She broke the little stems up off the grapes of all colors and put them in a jar as well as they look like goblin fingers or something.
The plastic shell looking things on the other side she is using as "Dragon Scales" and they are the center of sun flowers.
They have a hairy cover and we pulled the flowers apart and then pulled the furry/hairy covers off the plastic disc. She put the furry ones in a jar and is calling them "Tarantula Bodies" and the discs are in another jar for the dragon scales.
If you have ever held a tarantula, they actually do have hairy filament bodies so it works.
One of my favorite fillings that night was "sponge mushrooms." I bought an entire bag of them thinking they were the edible sponge mushrooms that are really healthy for you but instead, ended up getting the decorative sponge mushrooms you use for potpourri.
They look a bit like brains so she will title those "dried Monkey Brains" or something.
For some reason, I didn't end up having a picture of that jar with the mushrooms in it but here is a picture of the bag. I have been fighting a migraine all day so what I have is what I am using. They are from "San Francisco Herb Co." out of San Fransisco. I am sure you could find some cool dried mushrooms at a grocery or craft store or really cool ones at any Asian grocery stores if you have any in your area.
I went to every store in town that does holiday decorations looking for more of the "bloody" fingers to fill up this jar a bit more but they didn't have any anywhere.
I did find one store with green witches fingers but they were not cheap so I figure if I go after the holiday, I will be able to get a few bags of those and mix them with these fingers for cool effect.
Princess did have fun doing this the first night but it got late and then she lost interest as she got "tired" of it. I realized then that she starts lots of projects or shows interest at the beginning and then fizzles out towards the end.
I know I have been that way on certain projects so I try to give myself a time limit to get things finished as if I start and don't get it done in a certain time frame, I tend to get busy doing other things. Sometimes, that makes me have things in boxes waiting to get finished but on the other side, we have finished MANY projects as you can see by my blog.
The funny thing about my blogging is, it is all stuff I do anyway. I never have to freak and think "what will I blog about?" because I am forever doing a new project. Something always seems to come up and usually my problem isn't finding projects to do, it is that I am doing a project and half way through think, "Oh, this would have been a good thing to post about." so I hurriedly take a picture of the project in the middle and then at the end usually forgetting the "before" picture.
Tomorrow, I will show the cute jars, lids and fillings I did yesterday. To be continued......
