Homemade Christmas Decorations

At the same time that I decided to try out some Halloween Wine Bottle Decorations this year, I decided to try the same with some cute ideas for Christmas too.

I chose during the summer what I wanted to do and spray painted all my bottles then. They've been sitting on my shelf, just waiting to be hand painted and crafted, and I finally got around to it this week!

Christmas and Halloween bottles in the making!

I didn't do as many for Christmas, partially because I didn't have as many good Christmas spray paint colours, and partially because there weren't as many ideas that really jumped out at me for this time of year.

I am, however, incredibly happy with the ones I did do!

These two bottles were fun and ridiculously easy to do:

First, you roughly sand the bottle.

Then coat it in mod podge or liquid glue.

Next, you roll it in epsom salts until it's fully coated. I had to roll it and then sprinkle more salt on to fill in the gaps. 

Wait for it to dry fully and then spray paint it any colour you want!

Voila! The epsom salts give these bottles some really neat texture and glitter and would make a beautiful centre piece, if I had a dining room table! :-P

This one was really easy, which is why I chose to do it this way. I was originally thinking about painting on a Santa face, but I saw this idea on Pinterest and just loved it! Again, it's so simple and rustic! I accented it a little with random buttons and beads I had lying around, but the beauty of it is you can do anything you want with it!

Now this one is by far my favourite, of all the bottles I've painted this year. Again, it's another idea I saw on Pinterest and fell in love with. I'm very happy with how well it turned out! I surprised myself a little with this one :-) Just acrylic paints, some Christmas ribbon, and a square from one of Adrian's old t-shirts, hot glued onto the top and tied off!

So much fun!

These wine bottle crafts are a ton of fun and are so so easy and versatile! There is so much you can do with these, and they are a great and cheap way to repurpose old wine bottles! They do take a bit of planning ahead if you live in colder climates like I do and can't spray paint year round, but other than that, they are a cinch! A bit of paint, some cloth scraps or beads or buttons, epsom salts, a hot glue gun... etc... there's so much you can do with these tools!

One tip that I learned the hard way: when buying spray paint, it really is worth it to buy the more expensive stuff. I tried the cheaper variety, not thinking there would be an important difference, and there really is! It didn't spray evenly, and didn't stick the way the more expensive stuff does! I promise you, it's worth it! Also, I didn't find I needed to sand down the bottles at all when I used the more expensive stuff, but I have read that sanding can help either way.