This was inspired by so many pins, but in the end we bluffed our way through it all! Shhhh….

 This fits in just perfectly with all the books I’m reading right now, but I didn’t do it on purpose, I swear! (in case you were curious, The Forbidden Wish and The Girl of Fire and Thorns Series. Watch out for their reviews!)

Step 1

You will need glass jars or containers, PVA glue, paint brushes, food colouring.

We tried various ways of getting the colour onto the glass jar:

1. We diluted the PVA glue with water and added a load of food colouring – liquid – it meant that it was far too runny and there was hardly any colour.

2. We baked it at a really hot temperature and they burnt. ( just wait for it to cool then wash them – good as new)

3. We just added food colour to straight up PVA glue – we got a stronger colour especially from the gel colour.

4. We baked it at a really really cool temperature which made it look really good – however the liquid food colour was still sticky

5. we added liquid food colour to PVA glue and painted it on and left it to dry ( over the sticky) and this worked perfectly.

I had 4 jars, 1 purple which was method 4 but with gel food colour and 3 red – one is my hair stick and pterodactyl clip holder, the other two were for test purposes with regards to step 2.

The first time we tried it we painted it on the inside, but deciding we wanted to put things in the jar each separate time after that we painted it on the outside. We were concerned that the colour would either get scratched off or that candle flames might interfere with it.

Step 2

You will need some kind of dimensional (fabric) paint. I’ve used gold by Tulip. This seems to be what is used in most of the pins.

It’s advisable to do this bit in steps. Letting it dry in between, otherwise you end up with golden fingers! I had test jars because I had no idea how I wanted to decorate the jars. Which I’m glad I did, it’s not as easy as I thought it would be!

In fact I found it very hard at all. In the end I’m surprised that I made them look as good as I did. And that might be because I doodled all over the second test jar. I’d recommend doing a test jar yourself if you were to try this. Not only is it hard to draw these designs, it’s also hard to draw with this gloopy stuff coming out of a nozzle.

Expecting this to use a lot of the gold, I bought two 1.25 fl oz/37 ml containers and two 4 fl oz/ 118ml containers. In all my doodling decorating glory, I didn’t even use up a whole 1.25 fl oz container of the stuff. It goes far! In fact, the whole process doesn’t use much material at all!

CONCLUSION:

Adding liquid food colouring to the glue and painting it on and leaving it to dry seemed the best way to get this to work. Baking it just made it sticky and didn’t even make it resistant to anything. any type of liquid and the colour was coming off. Be careful with the poor things, they’re delicate.

Burnt glue smells WONDERFUL.
(That was sarcasm. Don’t try burning glue.)

I’m pretty impressed with what I finally managed to create, though I’m not sure what I’ll do with the first tester jar. Maybe pretty it up and use it for some kind of something. Any ideas?