Halloween Decorations- DIY Potion Jars

I love to make stuff. Doesn't matter what kind of stuff, if I can put it together myself I will. Honestly, I'm the kind of weirdo that gets excited about building a dresser from IKEA. Being able to point at something and say, "I made that!" is what I live for. I like to browse Pinterest in my down time after the kids go to bed and search for ideas, but lately I've noticed a trend that I'm not sure I like. The posts are either absolutely perfect and likely done by someone who does that kind of work for a living, or they are considered 'fails'. What is so wrong about those so called fails? There is absolutely nothing wrong with making a mistake and learning from it. It's an important lesson to learn in life as well, but it's something that I think about a lot when I'm crafting, especially now that my daughter joins me sometimes. And that is why I am here now, to try as many different kinds of crafting projects as I possibly can, and break down the entire process to show you what works, what doesn't, and hopefully let you learn from my mistakes. So before I get started, I just want to say thank you so much for being here and helping me to make this into something real. Since you all are the reason I'm doing this, if there's anything you think I could do to make this better, please let me know. I am going to be keeping things a bit more simple for this week, but don't worry, I will be attempting the crazier Pinterest projects here soon enough.

It's almost Halloween! Time for cheesy horror movies, costumes, and all things pumpkin spice. It's the gateway to the holiday season, which for me always passes by in a beautiful blur of colorful lights, too much food, and a little bit of family drama. I am a baker at heart so Thanksgiving will always be my favorite (and I will quit hosting it when I'm dead) but Halloween allows for a level of creativity that that other don't and I'm a sucker for a good creative outlet. You know how everyone has that one house in the neighborhood that goes to spectacularly overboard that they're all people can talk about the next day and you swear to yourself that that's gonna be you someday. A memorable house doesn't require thousands of dollars worth of animatronics though. I've seen some pretty impressive DIY projects that look simple, and I've picked a few this week for us to try out.

I'm starting off small today. I made potion jars using old containers, loosely referencing these. Normally they are done with spice jars or something similar, but because we already got the beginning of cold and flu season, I had some empty medicine bottles too so I wanted to see what that looked like.

Supply list

-Random jars and containers

-Hot glue gun (I used a low temp)

-Spray paint, matte black and copper (any metallic should be fine)

-Twine

-Any additional decoration for personal touch

According to (source) you want to sand the surface of the containers. I have quite a few jars so I decided to do half and see what kind of difference it actually makes.

After sanding was the decorating, and honestly, with the hot glue gun there is no wrong way to do this. I tried doing some fun swirl patterns, zig zags, and even just randomly flung glue around to see how it would look, and it all turned out looking pretty much the same, although that might have more to do with the fact that my swirls and zig zags don't really look like swirls or zig zags. I haven't used a glue gun since middle school and it took a few tries to get the hang of it. At this point the (source) used spanish moss and cork to decorate and while I liked the end result, I'm not here to just copy exactly what everyone else is doing. I wanted to see what I could make without it.

Honestly, I didn't think about what I was writing on the jars until I was sitting there with the hot glue gun. It took a considerable amount of thought trying to come up with spooky sounding potion ingredients, and by the end I was struggling to think of anything that would fit on the bottle, which is why my last bottle has cat hair. I also made bat wings, spider eggs, and fog juice (from A Nightmare Before Christmas).

Once I felt I had enough glue covering everything it was time to paint. I used the copper paint first, although if you'd rather I'm sure any other metallic paint would look just as good for these. It took two coats to get them fully covered and even then I missed a few spots, but they already look much better than I was expecting. The cold medicine bottles looked like the paint was just going to run down the sides, even the one I used sandpaper on, but it ended up sticking just fine.

At this point in the project, two things have become painfully obvious to me. One, I didn't use enough glue or decoration on the cold medicine lids and you can see the ridges peeking out. A cork ball over that lid would actually look really good with those bottles, but the ones they came with look a little weird in this context. Two, there is no disguising a prescription pill bottle as anything other than a prescription pill bottle.

After waiting about an hour for the copper paint to dry, I added a thin layer of the matte black. It seemed to look best when I kept it farther away and just misted over the copper, otherwise it looked just a little too dark. If I got too close it completely covered the copper and ruined the effect, but when I did manage to get it right, it gave it a very cool worn, rusted look.

I think they look fun they way they are here, so if you want to stop here, that's fine. I was planning on stopping here as well. Except that the night after I finished these I saw a roll of twine at the craft store, and I thought it would look great wrapped around the tops. Only an extra five minutes of work, and it covers up the gaps under the lids and hides some of the spots where I didn't get enough paint.

Overall, this was a much more straightforward project than I thought, considering the end result. This is easily a one afternoon deal and it took me some significant effort to do anything to mess it up. Sanding the containers didn't seem to make too much of a difference either. Despite my minor issues with the medicine lids, these look super spooky and will make an excellent addition to my ever expanding collection of halloween decorations. I don't think mine looked quite as good as the ones I was attempting to replicate, but I knew without adding extra decoration that it wasn't going to. It was still fun and I was excited about being able to share it with you.

After doing a little bit of research, I discovered an alternate way this project could have gone. Using black spray paint and then lightly applying a metallic acrylic paint with a sponge also creates this old rusty look that has become associated with all things spooky. If you have any questions, or suggestions for next time, please let me know. We will be continuing to recreate more DIY Halloween projects later this week!