All That Glitters

Sometimes I'm a bit of a hoarder. For someone who loves to throw stuff out and organize, I do love to collect things that I think I can repurpose. Over the past two years, I've been holding on to the glass jars from my favorite soy candles at Target. They are really easy to clean off and they are a good shape.

I reused them in the summer by putting citronella tea lights in them and putting them around my back porch. I reused them last Christmas by putting white votives in them and staggering them on my floor to ceiling built-in bookshelves. This year I wanted to really repurpose them and make a Christmas decoration that I would be able to use year after year.

I started with clean, dry glass jars. If you aren't a hoarder with 20+ old candle jars but you want to make these, dollar stores always have inexpensive glass jars in a variety of shapes and sizes. I ran mine through the dishwasher right before I started to make sure they were really clean. 

Materials:

1. Mod Podge

2. Glitter (the chunkier the better)

3. Foam paint brush

4. Acrylic coat spray

5. Masking tape

 I taped the top edge of my jars so I would have a clean line of glitter. Next, I painted a thin coat of Mod Podge around the entire base on the jar. Mod Podge dries so fast so you have to get the glitter on right away. When I made these, I used large chunky glitter (pictured below) and smaller glitter (the powder kind). The powdery glitter was hard to use because it created small mounds of glitter and I found that I wasted a lot of glitter trying to cover the whole surface area and create an even look. 

After shaking excessively, I laid them upside down to dry. If you are using tape to create any type of pattern or line, be sure to pull the tape off while the Mod Podge/glitter is still wet. If you wait until it dries, you will risk the glitter peeling off with the tape.  

I let my jars dry overnight before I sprayed them with an acrylic sealing spray. This spray will keep the glitter from falling off onto everything. 

 Ideally, I would give these as a pretty DIY gift, but I liked them so much (and was done Christmas shopping) that I kept them for myself!