Monday, September 6, 2010

Jar o' Lanterns

I dunno about anyone else but I hate carving pumpkins into Jack o' Lanterns. They feel and smell gross and they start to mold faster than the failed science experiments in the back of my fridge. I like the tradition of a Jack o' Lantern though, so I decided that I would make some faux ones to decorate my porch with this Halloween. I started by gathering up an assortment of glass jars about a month ago. I even bought things in a glass jar that I would normally have bought in a plastic jars or cans to get the jars for this project. BTW buying the glass jar is actually cheaper sometimes... who knew. Anyway the other materials needed for the project are contact paper, scissors, marker or pen, votive candles and orange spray paint .

First you need clean all the jars and scrape off the labels.  I found that if I soaked the jars in really hot water with a little soap in it that I could easily scrape off the labels with a scrubber. Let them dry thoroughly before you try to paint them. Next you need to make faces with the contact paper. I held the paper up to the jar to get an idea of how much space I had to work with then I free handed a Jack o' Lantern face onto the contact paper and cut it out. Peel and stick the face onto the jar in the arrangement that you like. 

Next you need to spray paint it. The paint I got is fast drying which is awesome. For it you only had to wait 1 minute between coats but for regular paint (which I couldn't find in orange) you would wait ten minutes between coats. Spray an even coat all around the jar then repeat until you have it completely coated. 

When the paint is dry, mine took ten minutes but most take one hour, peel off the contact paper and look at your lovely Jar o' Lantern. I couldn't get a good "night time" shot of these but you put votive candle inside of them so that they glow like a real Jack o' Lantern.

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