D.I.Y. Frosted Glass Votives

(Disclaimer: Do it yourself projects are never as easy as the tutorial makes it seem.)

Today my family and two other families met together for a dinner and game night that we have annually been doing for a couple of years now. The hostess refused to let us bring a dish or dessert so instead I made her a gift; some candle votives.

So, in reality these weren't that hard to make. The original tutorial I found recommended some very specific items that were pretty pricey or I just couldn't find at all. Just going to the store and attempting to find materials was half the battle. (Also I only had 4 hours to get everything and make it) It also included some color spray options, none of which looked very nice so here we have an alternative that you can play freely with.

What you need:
- glass cups (we found these at value village, a thrift store for $1 each)
- frosted glass spray
- tape/stickers/rubber bands/jute (this depends on your level of creativity and what you want your finished look to resemble.)

First thing you should do, if you already haven't is wash the glasses and dry them completely. Then use rubbing alcohol or windex to clean them and create a clean surface for the frosted spray to adhere to. From here on out try and only touch the inside of the glass or the outside where you have already placed tape or something covering the glass.

Technique 1: Washi Tape
While on our hunt for a thin adhesive tape we were looking for something thin, preferably around a quarter of an inch thick that could be adhesive. Easy, right? Wrong. The only thing that thin was called super-adhesive-double-sided-permanent-tape or something so we did not get that. That or the $18 vinyl tape. So we went with a roll of this inexpensive decorative tape for our first glass. I simply wrapped it around in a curved pattern, almost like branches.
For the cleanest edges make sure the tape is really sticking on there, and if you are curving something that is not meant to be curved, clean up those lines with more tape.

For all of the glasses, I took them outside and put them on newspaper on a flat surface (or if you're me you put them on a giant upside down ceramic bowl in your dead lawn, which is why there isn't a picture of this process) so that the bottoms were up, and the lips of the glasses down. Be conscious of the fact that you will be spraying the bottom -unless you tape it off- so place your tape and coverings purposefully!

After applying two coats and letting it dry (which doesn't take very long, about 5 to 10 minutes a coat) you can take the tape off. Peel off smoothly, and in line with it's shape, to avoid extra peeling of the frosted spray. The washi tape was really easy to remove and left pretty clean lines on the glass.

Technique 2: Stickers
For the second glass I foraged some stickers from a drawer of stickers in my craft area and managed to find these heart ones, which must have been from Valentines day years ago. These were nice to use because they weren't overly sticky, and peeled off nicely when It came time for that. The tutorial I saw originally used circular stickers to make a polka dot votive which I really liked visually, but apparently they don't carry circular stickers in my local craft stores.

Technique 3: Rubber bands
Although I originally tried to use jute on this one, the shape of the glasses I had found didn't really allow for the lines I wanted; the jute just wanted to slide down. So in a rush a grabbed a hand full of rubber bands and haphazardly arranged them onto the glass. The thicker ones that went around without twisting were by far my favorite, but the mixture of all the widths created an awesome effect.
When taking the rubber bands off, lift them and then cut them off. Because the spray covered the rubber it changed its properties slightly and some of the frost will want to come with the band if you just roll it off. Trust me on this one.

To finish them off, we filled them with flattened glass marbles that we had around our house and a generic tea candle that was later lit to show the patterns on the now frosted glasses. All in all, it was a pretty inexpensive and not time consuming project that, once you get the right materials, is pretty easy to do. (Your grandma will love it as a gift. Especially if you make like Christmas themed ones with reindeer silhouettes or something.)
In the end I had three different glasses that were all unique and the hostess we had given them to was very impressed that I had made, and not bought them.

"This little light o' mine, I'm gunna let it shine..."