In this tutorial, I show you how to make tinted glass easily at home using Bostik PVA Glue. Before turning our pretty coloured glass into a beach themed light up bottle.
Disclosure: I am delighted to be working with Bostik as a Bostik Blogger. Each month the Bostik Bloggers are set a theme with the challenge to create a craft that our readers can easily re-create at home. This month’s theme is the Beach.
What you need to make tinted glass bottles
Bostik PVA Glue
Food Colouring (I used gels)
Clear glass bottles or Jars
Before you start colouring your glass, make sure that you protect your work surface. Food colouring has a nasty habit of staining everything it comes in contact with.
About Bostik PVA Glue
Bostik PVA Glue is a non-toxic, general purpose white glue that is suitable for many arts and crafts projects. It is water-based, making it perfect for mixing with many paints, and it dries clear. These two characteristics are what makes it the ideal product to use for glass tinting.
How to Tint Clear Glass with Bostik PVA Glue.
Mix three parts Bostik PVA glue with one part water and mix well. The consistency should be similar to a thick paint.
Add food colouring to obtain a deep colour of your choosing. As the glass tint dries, the colour will lighten so bear that in mind when mixing.
Pour the glue mixture into the bottle and turn it, so all the surfaces are coated before allowing the excess to drain out for a couple of minutes.
Sit the bottle the right way up and leave to stand for about an hour. This allows any excess colour to move to the bottom of the jar and will help prevent streaks on finished bottles or jars.
Place the bottle in the oven on it’s lowest setting and bake until the coloured glue is dry and transparent. I checked mine after 20 minutes and gave it another 20, so it took about 40 minutes in total. Jars or a wider necked bottle may well need less time.
Leave to cool before displaying however you choose. Please note this finish is not waterproof, so it is not suitable for the inside of vases or anything you drink from.
Making a beach themed light up bottle.
To turn my tinted glass bottle into a light, I used LED wine bottle lights (Amazon affiliate link). They are available both in battery and solar versions and consist of a ‘cork’ power pack and a string of fairy lights on a wire that you push down the neck of a bottle.
Tinted glass bottles work beautifully with these lights even without any further embellishment, but my daughter had set her heart on having a coastal themed lamp for her bedroom, so we decided to embellish our bottle further.
We knotted some string to make a fisherman’s net to cover our bottle and picked out some pretty shells, sea glass and pearls to decorate it with.
We used Bostik Extra Strength Glu Dots to hold our netting and larger shells and sea glass in place. These double-sided sticky dots are incredibly quick and easy to use and stick to almost anything. They provide a permanent, instant bond between the bottle and our beach embellishments, making them far easier to place compared to using traditional wet glue.
We also used some tiny pearl beads and shells on our beach themed bottle. I didn’t want any glue residue showing around these miniature decorations so chose to use Bostik Micro Dots to stick them down. The micro dots turn any object into a sticker making them perfect from small and irregular shaped embellishments. These tiny sticky dots are super simple to use, place your object onto the sheet, rub the backing to transfer the dots and lift off.
And here is our finished light up bottle. The tinted glass is coloured a beautiful sea green and decorated with our pretty beach finds. It’s a lovely way to re-use a glass bottle and bring a little bit of your holiday home with you.
For more creative crafts using fairy lights check out our Twig Chandelier, our Acorn Cap Solar LED Lights and our Stunning Woodland Table Decoration.
And for more glass craft inspiration take a look at our Glass Gem Lantern and our Home-made Reed Diffusers.
2 comments
Very innovative ideas !!
Thank you Spiral :)