St. Patrick's Day Blessings For You

In finding Irish blessings, prayers and wishes for this

St. Patrick's Day display, I felt blessed myself reading 

all of them.  I selected my favorite ones to share with 

you today...I hope that you feel blessed, too. 

The framed chicken wire (made originally to hold Christmas

 cards but has been handy to change out seasonally) 

holds the blessings and other Irish-inspired items.  

I'm pretending that an ancient Irish calligrapher penned

these sayings for us...

...although they were just typed in a word processing system

in Celtic Hand, Kelt, and Patrick fonts and printed on

paper aged with coffee grounds or scrapbook paper.

 First Frame...

The key and the lollies were items used in Valentine decorations

and re-outfitted with shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day.

Second Frame...

Did you know that the phrase "The Luck of the Irish" started out referring to the bad

luck of Irish immigrants to the United States?  First, they had the potato famine in Ireland

and then many had a hard time finding work in the U.S. because they were thought to be

lazy, stupid, drunken idiots with bad luck following them.  Eventually the original contempt 

behind the phrase was lost and it became known to mean that the Irish are a happy,

charmed race of people who are quite lucky. 

The green bottles in the display are ones that I have been

buying here and there when I find them on sale mainly from

Hobby Lobby and Jo Anne's.  I enjoyed looking at the low

 prices I got them for but finally the price tags had to come off.

Maybe not too successfully, but I tried to mimick the look of

soldered bottles with four leaf clovers on top.  If you want to

see that trial and error process click Easy Soldered-Bottle Look.

May you have "God and His angels close at hand" to 

you today watching over you.

Easy Soldered Bottle Look

Have you seen the lovely sea life soldered onto bottles?

These are from Greyfreth.  Click on the link to see more of her work. 

In an attempt to copy that soldered bottle look for a

St. Patrick's Day display, I experimented with some normal craft

 supplies that do not require the special materials and tools that

 real soldering requires.  Of course, real soldering looks better. 

Because I don't want these green bottles to forever be 

St. Patrick's Day bottles with a shamrock on top, I was 

attempting to get the soldered look without actually going over

 the lip of the bottle and really sealing the stopper on there.

For a topper, simple card stock punch outs were first given a 

coat of Aleene's tacky glue and allowed to dry.

  This step gave the paper more strength and substance. 

The shamrocks were then glued onto a piece of floral wire

that had been stuck into a painted cork 

(or in some bottles rolled up paper) bottle stopper.

Extra Tacky Glue was added to the stopper in hopes that would

be enough to make it look soldered when it dried...it did not...

...even after painting the dried glue a similar color to what real

soldering looks like after the patina liquid has been applied.

The shamrocks were also painted with the same dark brown

and almost black acrylic paints to try to mimick metal. 

Since just painting the corks was not enough and adding

bottled glue was not enough to get "the look", I tried some 

sealing wax I had left over from a past wedding project. 

Ummm...that just looks like a candle in top of the bottle now.

Even after painting the sealing wax, it still looked like a 

candle but now it is a black/brown candle. 

Next, I tried globbing hot glue around the cork but trying not to

get too much on the bottle ('cause I want to be able to take

these toppers off after March 17th).

The hot glue technique worked much better than the bottled 

glue or the sealing wax because I could turn to bottle sideways

while the hot glue cooled (which is just a few seconds) and control

how "drippy" the glue looked on the cork.  If you try the hot 

glue method and don't mind if the topper is sealed on the 

bottle, come on down the neck of the bottle a little more

with the glue to get the look of real soldering. 

Because the cork was already painted, it was easy to paint 

the dried hot glue to match...I recommend that. 

So, my imitation soldered bottles are as good as I have time

for right now....you won't be able to tell the difference "from 

a galloping horse".  That's a phrase my mother passed along to

us from her great aunt who used to say, "It'll never be seen 

from a galloping horse", meaning that even if something 

wasn't perfect, it was good enough.  

Even though these green bottles are not expensive (most were

$2 or less from Hobby Lobby and Jo Ann's...the bigger ones

$4-5) I will be on the lookout for bottles I wouldn't mind

sealing up to get more of the real soldered look in the future. 

I'm sharing this post over at
Dishing It and Digging It @ The Stonybrook House