I had an old jar and decided to give it a little spruce up to use it to put some various art and craft things inside. It's the first time I've done this and it didn't work out exactly how I wanted, its a little rough but it'll do the job of holding some things to create some prettier items in the future. If anything I was exploring new things and finding the limitations of certain materials and my skills!

There's a video of me making the jar on YouTube and some more detailed instructions below. Thank you for checking it out.

Step 1: Tools and Materials

Tools:

- Scissors

- Craft knife/scalpel

- Small paintbrush

- Pencil and pen

- Ruler

- Some coins or small shapes to draw around

Materials:

- Masking tape (preferably some decent stuff, unlike mine)

- Enamel paints or paint that sticks to glass, I used red and silver

- Some black card and plastic (or any colour of your choice)

- Glue, I used UHU

- PlastiKote spray

Step 2: Cutting Out the Shapes and Placing Them

I decided to use a selection of coins to make different size circles and shapes from the masking tape and then stick onto the jar. It was just a random placement, I kept spinning the jar around and putting them on as I cut them. I then cut some long strips of masking tape to stick down two of the sides so that there were 2 separate parts to paint 2 different colours. I suppose you could do this repeatedly and use lots of colours or repeat two colours in stripes all the way around the jar.

Step 3: Painting the Jar

I used some enamel paints that I had left over from another project and started painting! I had to do 3 coats of paint on the jar and I feel like I could have done 4 in the end.

Unfortunately the masking tape I had started peeling away pretty quickly despite sticking it down as well as I could prior to the painting. The tape was from a cheap shop though so I guess I have myself to blame for that. This made it so when I peeled the tape off the lines weren't crisp in every area so I had to use my scalpel to scrape as much paint off as I could.

Step 4: Sticking the Card and Plastic on and Using the PlastiKote

I used the same coins to create shapes on some black card from junk mail I had recently. I made sure the areas I cut out were smaller than the circles on the jar and then cut around them giving all different borders and shapes. This was once again pretty random and I just cut a load of shapes and stuck them on. I then took plastic from some packaging and cut it into plastic strips to stick down the areas where the colours change. In hindsight I think some paper would have been better but I was trying to re use as much old stuff as possible.

After I had stuck it all together I used some PlastoKote to seal the paint and give the glass a kinda cool frosted look to it. This should hopefully help in the future to clean the jar if I spill anything on it (which will happen).

Step 5: Chuck Some Stuff in the Jar!

The PlastiKote dries within about 20 minutes which means I could throw some things into it straight away, paintbrushes, pens, rulers etc. all got a home. As I said before its not 100% as I hoped it would be but I learnt some new things about materials I hadn't really crafted with before which is always a good thing. I think you guys could do a better job than I!