How To Make Halloween Bottles and Jars

Making your own Halloween bottles and jars for decorations
 at a party or for a display in your home is fun and inexpensive.

For the most cost-effective bottles and jars, start saving glass

containers that you would normally throw away well in 

advance of Halloween (instead of buying them at a craft

store). Keep any lids or caps that you can also. 

You can also use glass containers (vases, etc.) 

that you already have.

Sometimes you can find premade labels for your

 Halloween bottles and jars at a craft store but you 

will get more variety and have more control over 

what the labels say by making them 

yourself or downloading them. 

I did not want gory or evil labels so I made my own labels at the Pic Monkey picture editing site.

There are lots of free printable labels for your bottles and

jars available on the internet. Of course you will need a

computer and printer to make these. Do a "search" on your

computer for "free printable Halloween labels". Pick the 

ones you like, download them to your computer and print

them. Primcats blog is one that I have used for labels.  

I don't have a color printer but the labels still look fine

even without the color that many of the printable labels

have "built in". 

If you don't have a color printer either, you can add some

color to your label by using parchment-colored paper. 

The blank lables on the left were printed on parchment-colored paper. The ones on the

right were printed on regular white copy paper. Both are from a non-color printer. 

You can also add more age to your labels by lightly 

brushing them with watered down paint. 

The easiest Halloween bottles to make are the ones where

you just add water and then drop in some food coloring.

If I glue the label before adding water, sometimes I have

gotten water on the label (not a good thing). So if your

container will have water in it, consider if you want to

glue on the label before or after adding water. 

One of the coolest things to watch when making these

bottles is to see the food color drift into the water. 

You don't have to make your bottles and jars look old but if 

you like that look it is easy to do. The Kim Six Fix blog has 

some good ideas on aging glass bottles and jars using paint

and sandpaper that I have tried. 

You can also paint the lids of jars at the same time you are distressing glass. 

Get lots of water and just a little acrylic paint on a brush.

Dab it on a paper towel then brush onto the glass jar in 

 random or cross hatch strokes. 

If you are going to just add colored water and a label to

 distressed jars, you can go heavy on the distressing. The

distressing makes the glass hard to see through.

 I had some bottles and jars that I was putting things in 

that I wanted the contents inside to be seen. 

It was easy to back off of the distressing of the containers that

 I wanted to be mostly see through by dabbing off

some of the watered down acrylic paint with wet saran wrap

and paper towels.

Ignore that orange paint in the middle of  the table. I was painting faded fake pumpkins too. 

 Kim Six suggests sandpapering the glass and that cannot

 be undone so keep that in mind. The sandpapering 

cuts down on visibility too. 

My "find" that I wanted to be seen in the jars was plastic

bugs from Dollar Tree. They were great shapes but not so

great colors for an elegant Halloween display so I spray

painted them all flat black. 

The snakes and grasshoppers went in their jars easily.

When I put these creepy crawlers in their jars initially all 

of the legs and tentacles were lost visually because they

were all elegantly black.

To keep them up against the sides of the jars so they could

be seen, I used water beads in the center of the jars.

These little clear balls swell up 100 percent when soaked in water. They are in the floral aisle of craft stores. 

The cute lizards were too small to use the water beads so

I hot glued them to the sides of the jar.

Here are the plastic bugs, etc. in their jars. 

Keep your eyes open for creative things to put in your jars.

I found a pack of plastic bony hands on sale. They became

the contents for three jars. 

Here are some photos with the see through bottles and jars...

If you don't want to worry with putting anything in the jars

and bottles, paint them a solid color and add a label!

That's how many Halloween decorative containers that you purchase already made at stores come. 

To get solid colored bottles Halloween bottles just spray

paint bottles you have gotten the labels off of.

I like to separate the bottles out when spray painting them so I can get to all sides easily. 

These  bottles were painted with a flat black spray paint

 and then had labels glued onto them.

This is an idea that I am kopy katting from Brian Patrick Flynn. The link to the actual project

is gone from where I saw it on HGTV website but here is his website.

The framed poster in the above photo is from a Halloween project I did in the past called "Aging Paper".

To see more photos of how I used the Halloween 
bottles and jars click on over to 
"Halloween Dining Room Tour".

If you are interested in seeing another Halloween display
using bottles and jars I did a few years ago, please click
"Black Birds Of A Feather Flock Together"