Spring Bottle Vases
Oh man. This set. This is the one I’ve been waiting for. It’s also the one my washi tape collection has been waiting for. I had a very hard time narrowing down my choices. All the COLORS!!!
You can see two of the other vase sets I’ve made here and here.
When I was trying to pick a word for this set, I looked over my inspirational words list. The word ‘hope’ jumped out at me immediately. If there’s ever a season of hope, it’s spring. For me, spring is the season of possibilities. I love every season for different reasons, but after a particularly long winter I love seeing the first leaves appear on the trees and the first flower buds. Looking for nests of baby birds has become one of my favorite spring pastimes. And, of course, spring is when my beloved hummingbirds arrive. All reasons to feel hopeful.
We’ve just been through a major cold spell here. So cold and snowy, in fact, that now that once it hit 50 degrees and most of the snow had melted, our kids started walking around in shorts. We may still get some snow this winter, but I have a feeling it won’t amount to much. Therefore I am ready to move on to all things spring!
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Here are the supplies I used for this project:
For the vases:
bottles (or jars)
paint (spray or acrylic)
washi tape
cardstock
scissors
For the flowers:
cardstock
floral tape
markers/paint (for details)
cutting machine
Finding bottles this time was easy, because we’ve been buying a lot of Costco packs of mocha frappuccinos. I don’t drink them, but I love upcycling the empty bottles!
I originally planned on painting the vases a metallic color, and then I remembered my color-shifting paint. I’ll take any excuse I can get to use it. I almost hated to cover it up with tape, but I think it all looks really pretty together.
To get the best results with the color-shifting paint, I started with a black base. I sprayed two coats of black, and once that dried sprayed three coats of green/copper. I didn’t finish until evening, so I left them overnight to dry before moving on.
Some of the tape I used was a little thin and didn’t cover as well as I would have liked, so I put a second piece on top of those, and that fixed it.
I’ve struggled with glitter cardstock in the past, but I had to try it again. That sparkly reddish pink color was exactly what I wanted. I bought a new blade for my Cameo, and the letters cut out perfectly!
I used Tacky glue to attach the letters, and it only required a few minutes of holding them before they were stuck on there.
After that I had a new set of vases! I just needed to decide what to put in them.
A love of dogwood trees and their flowers is something I share with my mom. We are fortunate to live where they grow in abundance, and every year I look forward to seeing them in bloom. We drive around taking pictures of them. Most of the trees near us have white flowers, so seeing the pink ones is a rare treat. We actually have a pink dogwood tree in our yard, but it is a very sad-looking tree. Last year it bloomed with the biggest, most beautiful reddish pink flowers ever, but there weren’t many of them.
Dogwood flowers symbolize many things, but among them are rebirth, strength, and durability. All of those, to me, are perfect for celebrating a hopeful world waking up from a long winter.
I’ve seen some realistic and gorgeous paper dogwood flowers out there, but for this project I decided to keep it simple. I found a template on the Silhouette Design Store that I used, and each flower came in 5 parts—2 for the petals, and 3 for the center. I cut out one sheet of white petals and another sheet of pink petals. I cut the centers out of light green.
I thought about using Tacky glue to assemble the flowers, but I ended up using my hot glue gun. The glue gun worked fine, and there was next to no drying time, but the Tacky glue would have worked just as well.
To make the flowers look a little more realistic, I curved the petals a little and just generally tried to make them look a little less perfect. I used a brown marker to color around the little notches in the white petals, and then I did the same with white paint on the pink flowers. I also added a little white paint around the centers of the flowers.
Dogwood flowers grow on trees, so I wanted to create some sort of branch for mine. I bought some brown floral stems at Michaels and ended up using them for the whole thing. I put four flowers on each branch. I left one stem whole, and cut the other into three pieces. So to attach the flowers to the stem I bent the end of each piece of stem and put a generous amount of hot glue on them before pressing them against the back of the flowers. There is probably a way to glue the stems together that would hold well, but I did not find it. I ended up pulling out my brown floral tape, but the problem with that is that it’s a lot darker than the stems. For this project I didn’t worry about it, because I knew you wouldn’t see much of the stems anyway once the flowers were in the vases. I held the smaller stems against the main stem and wrapped them with a few inches of floral tape. If I decide I want to hide the tape, I’ll use some acrylic paint. Best case I find a good match for the stem color and just have to paint the tape; worst case I paint the whole stem. Either way I don’t think it’s a big deal.
Now that they’ve been arranged in the jar, you really can’t see the darker spots on the flowers. They just look pretty and perfect for spring.
