My friend Amanda made the hubby and me homemade jam for our housewarming party last month. We’ve devoured two of the three jams, so two mini mason jars have been floating around our kitchen for a while. Brian thinks the same jar keeps ending up in our dishwasher (which is hopefully getting fixed today after being broken for a week and a half *groans*), but then he realized we have two of them. So then he wanted to throw both away *gasp*. Crazy husband, we can craft those!
So, that’s what I set out to do. I still have a ton of pages left from the dictionary I tore apart, so I decided to Mod Podge paper onto each jar and make them into candle holders. I combined several ideas I’d seen on Pinterest (cutting our a heart in the paper, covering vases with twine, Mod Podging ribbon) to make a cute set of tea light holders.
First, I cut out a strip of paper to wrap around my jars. Once it was cut to size, I folded it in half and cut a big heart out of the center.
Then, I slathered some Mod Podge on the jar and carefully placed the strip of paper on top of it. It was a little tricky to get it to lay flat, but after smoothing it out and moving it around a bit, it worked out.
I covered the whole jar again with Mod Podge, even the cutout portion of the heart. I chose to do this so the glass would have an etched effect. Plus, I bought battery operated tea lights from the dollar story so I didn’t want them to be so obviously fake.
I let this dry for a while, but not completely, before moving on to my next step. For the next part of my project, I cut out teal ribbon to strip the candle holder. To secure it to the jar, I simply painted a thicker layer of Mod Podge onto the spot I wanted the ribbon to stick. I smoothed the ribbon stripes out and let that dry, too.
To finish this project (and cover a few imperfections) I wrapped the bottom of the jars in twine and tied an accent piece of twine around the top of the jar. To secure the twine to the jar, I powered up my hot glue gun and placed little dabs of glue here and there. I wrapped the top with one single strand of twine, and the bottom with several layers of twine.
To top it off, I made a twine bow for each jar.
With one last dab of hot glue for the bow, my candle holders were left to dry overnight. The next day I placed a tea light in each one to see how they looked.
I think they turned out pretty darn cute. I’m not sure what the hubby will think when he finally notices them (he’s not a big fan of twine), but I think this was a fun way to reuse Amanda’s jam jars!
Did I mention Remmy stole a candle during my photo shoot? Darn dog…
Happy Tuesday!
A Smith of All Trades 