Old Jar Makeover...How to Take a Not-So-Pretty Jar From Blah to Beautiful!

Hello, Friends! Lately on Pinterest I have seen old, clear canning jars transformed into colored jars simply by using Elmer's glue and food coloring. I decided to see if it would actually work, and above is a photo of the jar that I turned to a pretty shade of blue and decorated with burlap, lace and muslin. Here is a step-by-step photo tutorial on how I created this lovely:

First off, you'll need to round up an old canning jar. As you can see in the photo below, the jar that I had was in pretty bad shape...all etched and milky looking. (I have it sitting on a soy sauce bottle to hold it up while I paint it.)

I then gathered the supplies needed to color the jar...simple ingredients that I had on hand: Elmer's glue and food coloring. I used an old yogurt container that I had washed out to mix the ingredients in:

I poured a little glue into the plastic container, added 2 drops of blue and 1 drop of green food coloring:

Using a plastic knife, I stirred the glue and food coloring until it was the pretty consistent shade of blue that I was going for:

Using a sponge brush I applied the glue mixture to the outside of the jar and allowed it to dry:

Here's a photo of the jar while it was drying...

TA-DAH!! Here's a photo of the jar completely dry...pretty cool, eh??

Next I decided to "spiff up" the jar a bit more by decorating it. I started with a piece of burlap ribbon that I attached to the middle of the jar using Terrifically Tacky Tape:

I then created a flower made from a scrap of muslin that was about 2" wide and about 14" long:

Fold the muslin in half and make a running stitch down the raw edge, gathering the muslin as you go:

When you reach the end of the strip of muslin, hold raw ends together and stitch in place to create a flower:

The flower looked perfectly fine like that, but I decided that I wanted it to be fluffier and have a bit more definition, so I snipped the fabric around the entire flower:

Which created a cute, fluffy flower like this:

I decorated the flower with a pretty chipboard button and a piece jute; attaching the flower to the burlap on the jar using a liquid adhesive called Liquid Fusion that I purchased at Hobby Lobby:

Using additional strips of Terrifically Tacky Tape, I attached 2 pieces of ivory colored lace around the burlap on the jar and then added a couple of pretty blue pearl head pins to the flower:

Using just a dab of CTMH Pearl Create-A-Shade Paint, I painted a simple chipboard key that came in a package of several cute chipboard shapes that I discovered in the $1.00 bin at Michael's:

After the paint on the key dried, I punched a hole in it and tied it to the mouth of the jar using jute twine:

And that's it, folks! I added some florist pebbles to the bottom of the jar, added some water, cut some daffodils from my flower bed and placed them in the jar which is now a beautiful shabby-chic vase. I LOVE how it turned out!! Hmmm...think I'll try to make a pink jar now...

Thanks for dropping by...have a SUPER week!!