Raise your hand if you, too, have a giant plastic bin full of old bottles.
No?
Okay, raise your hand if you, too, have a place back in your woods where the owners of a 1950s drive-in used to dump their trash.
Alright, that explains it. If you don't have a vintage dump on your property, then you're excused from maintaining a collection of vintage bottles of dubious quality.
It's my two-part long-running plan to 1) get all those bottles and other random pieces of assorted trash out of our wooded wonderland, and 2) upcycle as much of it as possible instead of making it part of someone else's dump. Matt particularly objects to Step 2 of this plan, as so far it's mainly resulted in me filling our 1910 general store chock-full of dirty old bottles, but still.
This autumn, Will and I have been inspired to try to make some of these old bottles into spooky potion bottles for Halloween. After I clean them, here are some of the tutorials that we're going to try:
- bottles embellished with scrapbook paper. It's not spooky, but it's super cute! I don't have Halloween-themed scrapbook paper, but I do have some Halloween-themed fabric that would work equally well.
- bottles embellished with white paint and sandpaper. I think we're going to paint completely over most of our bottles, but I do have a few clear bottles to play with. For those, it would be interesting to try this tutorial that involves sandpapering and partly painting the bottles, so that they look spooky but still see-through.
- colorful potion bottles. I really like these bottles as an alternative when you want to make potions but you don't want them to be "spooky." These are definitely potions made by (or from!) mermaids and unicorns!
- embossed skull on a bottle. The author of this tutorial used a styrofoam skull, but I've got a couple of different skull molds, so I'm wondering if papier mache, or even plaster of Paris, wouldn't work just as well.
- faux mercury glass potion bottles. Mercury glass makes potion bottles look very antique and authentic!
- free printable labels. This DIY potion labels don't reference any popular media, so they would work for your standard fairy tale kitchen.
- handmade apothecary. This is the most beautifully elaborate possible use for all of these DIY potion bottles! I'd like to imagine it as the play kitchen of a particularly morbid child.
- hot glue and paint. Will and I are definitely going to try this tutorial. Instead of regular craft acrylic paint, however, I think I'm going to try mixing it with baking soda to give it more of a ceramic look.
- hot glue and paint labels only. Here's the same hot glue and paint method, but only over the part of the bottle that has the label. This leaves the rest of the bottle clear to show off your spooky ingredients!
- matte black potion bottles. I want our bottles to each be unique, but I DO love the uniform look of all of these matte black potion bottles. I've got this exact spray paint, so maybe I'll at least have a matte black potion bottle section in our apothecary...
- papier mache embellishments. There are so many beautifully embellished potion bottles in this post, but my favorite is the papier mache eyeball!
- poison apple bottle. I am obsessed with all of the DIY poison apple tutorials that I've seen this fall. I just need to find a round bottle in the dump!
- resin potions. I hadn't thought that we'd fill our bottles with anything special... until I saw this post about making potions using resin!
- sticker paper potion labels. These are my favorites of all the free potion labels I've found, and the clear sticker paper is genius!
- transferred labels. Instead of gluing labels to the bottles, this author used an image transfer method.
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