Julie Finn
Decoupaging glass bottles is a cheap, easy way to upcycle something plain and ordinary into something unusual and outstanding.
Tissue paper is especially fun to work with because it comes in such a wide variety of colors, and it looks nice when overlapped–this makes tissue paper decoupaged glass bottles a great kid craft!
It’s also an easy way to transform a glass bottle that doesn’t have a ton of personality, such as these old wine bottles, or that you can’t quite get all the label glue off of. We also do this a lot with the stubbies that we find at the old dump site on our property; the labels on those bottles are long gone, but the decades of grunge don’t always want to come off.
Tissue paper decoupaged glass bottles make sweet centerpieces for wedding showers or birthday parties, and if you get your kid to make one this week and you secretly varnish it for her on Saturday, it’ll make an absolutely epic Mother’s Day gift (fill it with flowers first, obv). This would also make a great craft project for a day camp or Girl Scout meeting–my Girl Scout troop met just last week to learn the art of flower arranging, and my younger kiddo proudly created her arrangement in a spaghetti jar that she’d previously decoupaged with tissue paper .
To decoupage glass bottles with tissue paper, you will need:
glass bottles. Duh. Bottles without embossing work best for this project, as do clear ones, since the tissue paper will render the bottle translucent, to quite lovely effect.
tissue paper. I bought a box of multi-colored tissue paper squares years ago, and even though I feel like we use them all the freaking time, I also feel like the amount of tissue paper in this box never diminishes.
Mod Podge. We buy it by the gallon.
paint brushes. If you’re prompt with your clean-up, you should be able to rinse the glue completely out of these with warm water.
The process is simple. Paint a part of the glass jar with Mod Podge, then gently press a tissue paper square onto it. Repeat times infinity, ideally listening to an interesting audiobook (my younger kid and I made the particular bottles in these pictures while listening to The Secret Garden… such a good book).
One quirky fact about tissue paper is that the color does tend to bleed, so you don’t want to paint it with a heavy hand. If the color does get onto your paintbrush, just paint onto a piece of newspaper to clean it off.
This also means that the finished piece will need to be sealed . You can do this with several more layers of Mod Podge, but since I do a lot of home dec projects, I actually like to use whatever clear furniture varnish or sealant that I happen to have on hand. Check with your local Restore to score your very own half-used can of clear sealant!
These decoupaged glass bottles are really much more lovely than the photographs show (I’m a little loopy on pain meds from a recent wisdom tooth extraction, so I can’t decide if the photos look weird because I shot them weird, edited them weird, or only look weird to me because of the pain meds). I think that you’ll really appreciate them this summer, filled with fresh flowers from your gardens, lit through by sunlight from the window.
