Decorating Glass Bottles: How to Turn that Juice Bottle into a Masterpiece

Tools:

Newspaper

A glass bottle

Mod Podge©

A paintbrush

Tissue paper or a plain white napkin

Paints (optional)

Clear craft varnish (optional)

Black pen or thin-point permanent marker (optional)

Thin fabric (optional)

Coming up with cheap ways to decorate is always an ongoing battle. One of the cheapest ways to decorate is to create your own crafts, and the bonus is you can make use of your creative muscles (come on, now, I know you've been letting them grow dust). This particular technique is one that I picked up from other glass objects and adapted for bottles; the napkin aspect aspect is my own design.

First of all, you should find a bottle to decorate. You can get bottles in a number of ways. Perhaps the simplest is to use one from a drink; some drinks like Fuze©, Orangina©, and other juices have interesting glass bottle shapes that you can clean up and use. Best of all, they are usually less than $2, and you can enjoy a beverage while you're at it. If you want something a little more interesting, stores like Target and Wal-mart often sell glass bottles in the fake flowers' and crafts' sections. An adventurous person may even go bottle-hunting at thrift stores and the like.

Now, you have your bottle. If it was a drink bottle, make sure you have cleaned and dried it before starting. You may want to lay down some newspaper before you begin to prevent messes. One way to decorate a bottle like this is to take a plain, white napkin and draw a picture on it with the black pen or permanent marker. Make sure you are only drawing on one layer (and if you use a permanent marker, look to see what is under it so it doesn't bleed onto something important). You will be putting this on the bottle, so you should measure how big the bottle is compared to your napkin-you don't want to draw a picture too large or too small. You should make a picture that is slightly larger than the bottle because the napkin will wrinkle up. Also, abstract pictures seem to work better, though I have done some with suns and moons and the like.