Personalized Water Bottles

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm preparing for my sister-in-law's bridal shower in a few weeks.  We are having a mimosa bar but wanted something for the non-boozers to drink.  Considering we'll be using champagne flutes for the mimosa bar, we didn't want to have to supply other cups for non-alcoholic drinks... so the Personalized Water Bottle idea was born!

I know you can buy personalized bottles and you can even buy just the personalized label to add to your own bottles - but there are plenty of sites with different ways to make them yourself.  I'm cheap  thrifty, so I decided I would make them myself.  I came across this post from a darling website called Glorious Treats with a simple way to make these.

Here's what you need:

Water Bottles
Scrapbook Paper
Packing Tape
Paper Cutter

To make the label itself, I just used my word processor (I have a Mac, so for me it was Pages - if you're a PC user, you can just use Word).  I was able to fit 5 labels to a page and I found that 8.5" was the perfect width for these bottles, which made it super simple (no trimming the paper on the sides)!  You'll want the height of each label to be just a little thinner than the width of your packing tape.  For example, my packing tape was 1.88"so the height of each label is 1.75"

I put a really light gray box around each label so I would know where to cut it.   Make sure to leave a bit of a blank space at one end since they'll overlap a little bit when you wrap it around the bottle.  I left a larger blank spot since I knew I'd be adding a sunflower sticker.  

I would recommend printing this out on a plain sheet of paper to test it our before printing on your scrapbook/colored paper.   Once you have the placement right, print it out on your scrapbook paper and use a paper cutter to cut out each label.  You can use scissors, but a paper cutter will insure that your lines are nice a straight.  Add stickers if desired.

The first step in assembly is to remove the existing label from your water bottles.  Try to find bottles with a label that's like a thin plastic, not paper.  The paper ones seemed to leave more of a sticky glue residue left on the bottle.  These ones with the plastic-y label came off really easily and left almost no glue behind.

Measure out a piece of packing tape that's about an inch longer than the label on each side.  The original blog said to lay the paper down and place a strip of packing tape over the paper.  I found it was easier to place the packing tape sticky side up on the table, then place the paper face down on the tape.  Again, you'll want the tape to extend about 1" on each side of the label and just a little bit at the top and bottom.

Line up the paper with the first ridge on the bottle (this will give you a nice guide to follow), stick down the extra tape on the end, and wrap the label around the bottle.

Hopefully you were able to wrap it straight around the bottle and you'll end up lined up at the other end.  If not, you should be able to pull off the label and start again.  Once you do this a time or two, you'll see it's pretty easy to get it straight.

And that's it!  Now, I'll warn you... I don't think these are necessarily water-proof.  So I wouldn't recommend throwing them in a big bucket of ice.  If you make the label a little smaller so the tape extend further at the top and bottom and is able to stick really well to the bottle, then it MIGHT be water-proof.  You've been warned.

Our plan is to keep these in the fridge and pull them out right before the guests arrive to the party.  Again, as I said in my last post... I'll take lots of pics at the shower and post how everything looks "in action."  Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

 

Repurposed Beer/Pop Bottles

Oh, hello there.  It's been awhile....

I have been ridiculously busy with work, my apologies for taking F O R E V E R in getting a post up.  I'm working on a few items for my sister-in-law's bridal shower, so I'll be sharing those with you over the next few weeks.

The bride is a HUGE fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers - and that is an understatement.  She's such a huge fan that her wedding colors are black and yellow!  So me and the other bridesmaids agreed that a sunflower theme with lots of black and yellow would be appropriate for her shower.

She's also a big beer lover (I mean... aren't we all?!).  So I decided to try to incorporate that into the shower.  I have seen these painted bottles all over Pinterest, which I think are beautiful... but not quite what I needed.  I've also seen some beer/pop bottles wrapped in twine, jute, or yarn.  I also think these are great, but again... not quite what I was looking for!

So I combined a few of these ideas and ended up with these yellow bottles wrapped partly with jute and twine.

So here's what to do:

1. Drink beer (or pop if you prefer).  As if you need an excuse.  Save your bottles.

2. Remove the labels from the bottles.  I found that soaking them in hot water for a few minutes does the trick pretty well.  It even takes the sticky icky residue off!

3. Spray your bottles with Frosted Glass spray paint.  This will help the colored paint stick better, otherwise it will scratch off the glass very easily.  OPTIONAL - you can also paint the bottles with a spray primer over the frosted glass paint. This seems to help with the durability of the bottles, although the frosted glass paint may be enough if you don't anticipate much abuse to the bottles.

4. Paint your bottles in the desired color.  I'm not particular to brand.  I use Rustoleum a lot because it's pretty inexpensive and they have lots of fun colors.  Whatever you do, don't by spray paint from JoAnn or Michales - it's REALLY expensive there.  Try Hobby Lobby or even Lowes or Home Depot.  You can find the same exact paint there for about 1/2 the price.

5. After the bottles have dried, wrap them in jute and/or twine to your liking.

6. Sit back and look at what you've accomplished!

Here's a closer look.  You can see that I made them all a little different.  Some I used a thin twine and wrapped it all jee jobber (that's my husband's favorite word and I promised him I'd use it in a blog some day, so today's his day!).  Some I wrapped very neatly with the thin twine.  And others I used a thicker jute.  I found some wonderful jute at JoAnn for about $3 for a huge roll - it's in the jewelry section if you're looking!

I think I plan on putting sunflowers in all of them, but I may end up leaving some of them without flowers just as decoration.  The Bridal Shower is in August, so I'll be sure to post some pics of them "in action."

Now, go drink :)

 

Bathroom Redo

Before                                             After

When my husband and I moved into our house, we literally painted EVERY wall in the house except for the tiny half-bathroom downstairs.  The owners prior to us apparently just went through and painted every surface a pale yellow color... the walls, the doors, the trim, even the light switches!

As you might imagine, we got a little tired of painting.  So we left the downstairs bathroom alone for awhile.  I finally decided it was time to do something with it and I came across this aaahhhh-mazing idea on this brilliant website called Hammers & High Heels.  Please go check out this blog, there are a ba-zillion great ideas for your home!

So, here are a few "before" shots of the bathroom.  See that pale yellow color??  That was the color of my entire house when we moved in.  Ick.

We started by taking off the light switch covers, removing the mirror above the sink, and taping off where the chair rail would be.  Since the opening to the crawl space is in this bathroom, we decided to make the height of the chair rail level with the top of the crawlspace door.  And as you'll see I accidentally broke one of the light bulbs in the light fixture.  Whoops.

Then the painting began!  I just used a pre-mixed chalkboard paint from Lowes.  I think it was about $15 for a 1/2 gallon.  I left a little surprise behind the mirror for the next homeowners :)

My husband was in charge of putting up the chair rail and he did a wonderful job!

I loved the frame idea from Hammers and High Heels and decided to do the same :)  I also hung two funky candle holders on either side of the frame for a little more fun!  Anyone notice the fun little saying in the frame.  We like to have fun in our house, hah!

I found a couple little buckets at Goodwill for $1 each and hung up to hold the chalk and eraser.

My sweet husband left me a little message on the wall.  He wrote it backwards so I could read it in the mirror.

We've had some friends over and already have graffiti all over the walls.  My husband is from Pittsburgh, so he drew the Kennywood sign.  As you can see there are several Super Troopers quotes on the wall as well.

All in all this was a really easy project and only took us a few days to complete.  I wouldn't recommend doing this in a large bathroom or one with a shower.  I just don't know how the chalkboard paint would hold up with the humidity.

Happy creating, friends!

Coffee Filter Flowers

These coffee filter flowers are so pretty and SO easy (and cheap!) to make.  I found the idea on a darling site called Brown Paper Packages and decided to make these for my entryway (I just refinished a mirror and shelf and the poor shelf was looking awfully bare!).  Trust me, these are super simple and once you start you just might not stop... I'm thinking of making smaller flowers to affix to gifts - there are tons of things you can do with these!

Ok, here are the instructions:

Supplies:

8 coffee filters

Scissors

Glue

Wire

Floral Tape

Cut down 4 of the coffee filters as shown above (you can discard the small piece you just cut off).  

Now fold the filters individually (or two at a time) - you'll fold the filter 8 times total:

Fold 1

Fold 2

Fold 3

Fold 4

Snip the folded edge at an angle as shown above.

Open up one fold...

... and round out the edges to make a heart shape.  This does NOT have to be perfect - you won't be able to tell once you start assembling the flowers!

Once you've done this with all of the filters, separate the 4 smaller ones from the 4 larger ones.

Starting with a small filter, poke a hole through the middle and stick the floral wire through it.  You'll want to bend the top of the wire as shown above.  Dab just a touch of glue to the bent wire (I used hot glue, but really any kind will do)

Next comes the twisting!  This is a little confusing to explain, but trust me - you'll figure it out in no time!  All you need to do is start twisting the filter around the wire and onto itself.  See the picture above - this is the first filter twisted around the wire.

Next, slide another small filter onto the bottom and twist away!  You'll add all 4 small filters, then all 4 large filter - twisting in between each layer.

Here is what it looks like after the 4 small filters are on.  Really, you could stop here if you want a smaller flower.  I wanted nice big flowers for this project, so I kept going and added the larger filters!

Here is the final flower with all 8 filters.

All that's left to do is wrap the stem up with floral tape!  You'll want to wrap it really tight up around the base of the flower to keep it from unraveling or loosening.  Once that's secure, wrap the rest of the floral wire.  That's it!

You can display your flower alone or with several of them bunched together.  I have 3 displayed in a small vase in my entryway and love it!  I haven't tried it yet, but you can dye the coffee filters to make colored flowers - check out this great tutorial on how to do that.

Enjoy your beautiful flowers and happy creating!!