I'm a little pleased with myself right now, so please bear with me. It cost me $0 to make this craft. Absolutely freeeee is my favorite craft budget! I have been stashing all the materials to make this craft for a while, until I finally had everything together. All you need is an empty 6-pack. Keep the whole thing: cardboard pack and the bottles. I say keep the bottle caps too, because you know I'm going to come up with something to do with 'em in no time. Luckily, I live with a young man in his 20's and so these are ALWAYS stacked plentifully in the recycle bin and I can have my pick. I highly recommend that you wash these out with dish soap and let them dry for a good long while. I called this a "Boozy Bookend", but let's get real; I do not want my desk or bookshelf to reek of old beer. Gross. To be fair, if you don't have access to beer bottles because you don't drink, you could do the same thing with Coca-Cola glass bottles in a 6-pack, but I don't live in 1954, so they're not readily available to me. I think there are flavored sodas in glass bottle 6-packs at the grocery store, but as I said before the appeal of this craft for me was that it was FREE materials. Deal with it.
I really don't know what came over me yesterday. One minute I was waking up at 7a.m. to get ahead on homework (confession: I had a post due for one of my online classes at 9a.m. and may or may not have procrastinated a touch.) The next thing I knew, I had done a day's worth of school work in less than two hours and by 9a.m. I had three crafts going an one time! (Look for the frame and magazine pages in upcoming posts) I may have lost my mind for just a sec, but it worked. I found out that my white acrylic paint is alarmingly thin, so I was able to work on other crafty projects between the million or so coats it took to achieve full-coverage.
I use dried roses in this post. These roses from a bouquet I received after my fall were dried for 3ish days before I placed them in these bottles. If you don't know how to dry roses so that they keep their shape and color, comment below and I'll share that. I've been doing it since high school, so I will just go on assuming that everyone knows how to do that.
On to the actual tutorial...
Step 1: Wash the bottles out. Seriously, this is non-negotiable. Let them dry completely before painting. Step 2: Paint the bottles with acrylic. Thinner gloss paints will require multiple coats (the white took 5 or more for full coverage) whereas thicker flat coats were full-coverage in only a coat or two. The purple was a flat paint, so after it dried I covered with Mod Podge to give a gloss finish and protect the paint. Step 3: Spray paint the cardboard container. I recommend priming with primer or acrylic paint. ESPECIALLY on the exposed raw cardboard on the inside of the container. It just soaks spray paint right up.
Step 4: Once everything is dry, plop them together and stick 'em on a shelf. TaDa!!! That wasn't so hard now, was it?
Linked up at the following parties: Crafty Soiree, Blog Stalking Thursday, Hookin' up with HOH, Show off your stuff party
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