DIY Sea Glass

One summer day, as I was watching my niece and my nephews, during a time when my toddler son and my toddler nephew were napping, I found a fun project for my niece, nephew and myself to do.  It was easy, didn't take much brain power, wasn't too messy, too time-consuming or too material-heavy and it had fun results. As usual, I found this little project on Pinterest. However, the link just takes you to the picture I've posted below, so I didn't see a reason to post a link to that as well, as you can view it here.

Photo from Pinterest

 At first, I had trouble trying to figure out what glass to have the kids paint, but I decided going with vases was a good option - then they could give them as gifts at some point...or, they could keep them and enjoy the fruits of their labors. Thankfully, I have more vases than I know what to do with, so that required no effort or sacrifice on my part. I gotta be honest though...I did pull a glass pizza sauce jar out of the recycling for Peyton to use...she didn't notice and I'm still happy with that choice. I feel little to no guilt about it. I *might* feel a little guilty if she was a little older and knew better, but she didn't. MUAHWAHAHA! *Ahem* 

Anyway,  I poured the food coloring in with the Elmer's Glue and water and mixed it and since there is no blog about this already (that I could find), I'm posting more pictures than normal so you can see how it worked for us. Here is a picture of the mixture before it was mixed. I decided, to be on the safe side, to use a plastic bowl and knife to mix it (what else are plastic knives good for anyway?) as I didn't want to risk ruining something that I wouldn't want to throw away. 

Below is what it looked like after it was mixed....like paint. Kinda runny paint. 

After Gabe & Peyton chose their colors for their vases and all the paint was mixed, we got to the fun part: painting our vases!

As you can see, the paint was very runny and messy, but it worked. You definitely had to be thorough in your painting in order to get it to look anything like the picture above. The paint had streaks, splotches and bare spots if we weren't careful, but that's part of learning, right? 

We set them to dry on a paper towel and I would recommend moving the vases every once in a while to prevent them from sticking to the paper towel. Maybe using wax paper or something like that would've been better? Oh well, this worked just fine. I'd also recommend putting them on a placemat or something as well. I learned that very quickly as the placemat had blue, turquoise and pink rings from the vases. Thankfully, it did wash off just fine, but I wouldn't want to test that on my countertop. 

Once dried, I thought they all looked lovely. They may be a little more see-through than the picture from Pinterest and that could probably be prevented with a few more layers (I wasn't patient enough to try that). Either way, I thought they all turned out very sweet. And Peyton's pizza sauce jar? Well, I'm planning on decorating that with ribbon at the top - that'll make for a beautiful vase in itself, I think. 

I've waited a while to post this blog as I wanted to fill at least one of the vases with flowers so you could see the completed project and I finally got around to it! So, here it is! The finished project complete with flowers: 

This is the blue vase and since it was still fairly see-through, you can tell that the blue doesn't show up super great against the green stems, but I'm ok with that! I'm still happy with the results and how fun to have something other than a clear glass vase to put your flowers in?? 

This would make a great gift and your kids could either help or make their own or (if you are a bit of a perfectionist and control-freak) they could watch you. hehehehe. Better yet, have them make one and you make one too. You can never have too many pretty colored vases!  

EDITOR'S NOTE UPDATE: I just cleaned my vase and the color is practically all gone. I believe, in order to do this with greater success, you will want to be sure to just rinse out the vase after use - or even just wipe it down.