glitter bottles

i wanted inexpensive centerpieces for our wedding.  my theory is that no one cares about what's on your table.  i couldn't tell you what was in the middle of anyone's tables of any of the weddings i've been to.  except for the one that i went to and the centerpieces were so huge you couldn't see the person sitting across from you.  what the heck is that.  and since our budget is on the smaller scale of weddings, i didn't want to put too much of our budget towards the centerpieces when i could put that money towards more important things like alcohol.  duh.

so, my plan was to use wine bottles and beer bottles.  i ordered plain bottles without labels from a bottling website so i didn't have to deal with labels.  however, we did drink some wine and beer to make up some extra bottles.  to get the labels off of these, we put the bottles in boiling water in a large pot on our stove and let them steam for awhile.  we were still stuck with having to peel the labels off, scrubbing the tough spots that wouldn't give and still having glue residue on some of the bottles.  our next attempt was to put them in the sink in really hot water for a really long time.  but again, same frustrating results.  the only bottles that were easy to remove the labels from were miller lite in their new old school style bottles.  and after we reached the quota of wine bottles per table, the remaining extra bottles we just spray painted flat black even over top of the labels and then i just used the labels as a guide to write our hashtag on for later picture posting.

but this post is about the glitter bottles.  not my entire centerpiece.  so, i'll save the details for that later and get in to this glitter bottle extravaganza!

we'll have about 20 tables at our wedding reception.  so i purchased/drank 24 beer bottles specifically for glittering.  i mostly used beer bottles that we drank and rubbed the labels off of.  since having any residue on the bottles wouldn't be an issue with a heavy layer of glitter to mask it.

you will need bottles of any kind of your choosing.  for this we have beer bottles.  glitter.  we chose a more chunky glitter that you can buy in large quantities at the craft store.  modpodge.  i chose the glossy kind to give it an extra glossy/shiny/glittery appearance.  sponge brushes.  newspaper.  paper bowls.

since most of these bottles had labels on them, we went through the process of steaming the labels off.  i didn't clean our bottles with anything after the removal of labels.

in the bowl, i poured a small amount of glue in and then completely covered the base of the bowl in glitter.  i mixed it up and looked at its consistency.   you're wanting it to be just a tad wet but mostly glitter than glue.  you'll need it to be wet enough to stick to the bottles but you want the glitter to be thick enough that you can do this in one layer.

a little bit of glue

a lot of glitter

mix until it looks like this

after mixing the glue and glitter to the right consistency, you just use the sponge brush to paint it on the bottles.  i would get a large glob on my brush and then put it on the bottle and use the brush to kind of mush the glob around to get somewhat of an even coat.

some of our bottles aren't very even or smooth.  and that's OK.  for us at least.  i let them stand over night to completely dry.  and there is your glitter bottles.

i'm using fake flowers for our centerpieces (and our bouquets) so in these, i'll just be putting a single white rose.  i'll have a large wine bottle with a white rose and some leaves.  and then i'll have a black beer bottle with our hashtag painted on with some greenery.  i'm going to add a few more key pieces to really bring the centerpiece together and make it look more expensive than just spray painting bottles.  but that's for another post!