Glass & Candles

One of my fellow crafty pals picked up a load of free glassware at our local dump's swap shop for me recently, so I decided to try and do some glass painting with the pieces.  I made a ginormous mess in the kitchen that lasted for days, to the point where I was reduced to eating cheese & crackers for dinner because I couldn't fix a decent meal.  

The glass painting was extremely slow going and to be honest I'm not terribly excited about the final results.  Not my best work at all.  I encountered some issues with the alcohol ink that bummed me out.  They dried cloudy for some reason which was distressing.  I cleaned the glass with rubbing alcohol like you are supposed to but it didn't come out right.  

While I was waiting for stuff to dry, I made these beachy candles.  I'd gone down to the beach near my house that morning to get sand and stones.  The shells are mostly from Florida, brought back for me by friends.  The glass is, of course, purchased. 

For the large one, I glued a tall candle already in glass in the center before I filled the sides.  Then added the rope to the top. 

I have a craft show coming up on June 13 here in Buzzards Bay, so I wanted to burn one of the treasure candles to make sure that the wax didn't leak out of the bottom like it did when they were poured.  I wasn't going to sell these if they leaked and this one didn't.  

It took about 2 hours to uncover the glass.  If you fish it out quickly enough and wipe it off, the liquid wax comes right off.  Same with the shells.

I also made these for my craft fair.  Mini bottles with beach glass chips on chains.

Another good friend of mine posted a link to a tutorial on how to turn old bottles into picture frames. HERE is the link.  She also provided me with a bunch of empty wine bottles for me to use too!  I decided to use a wedding picture since I had a spare copy of it on hand.  First I poured in a bunch of sand, then rolled up the pic and dropped it down.  This is where I kind of ran into a problem.  The pic did stay against the glass because I kept the bottle angled when the pic was put in.  But it's also below the curved part so there's nothing you can use to push it into the sand.  All I could do was pour more sand in, then start dropping rocks, shells and glass behind the picture to keep it upright.  I found the purple thing (which is on elastic stretch cord) on clearance at Michael's, added the top bead to the cork and I had a string of strung glass pearls in a bead box.  

Back showing the glass and stuff.

I'm not sure how much else I will be able to do before the show next week.  Life has become extremely busy, stressful and complicated in our little world with a lot of family issues so there hasn't been a lot of time to devote to preparation, or time to devote to taking walks, beachcombing or day trips for that matter.  This year is going by just way, way too fast.