As I have mentioned before, I am a big fan of hot glue, and not just for the purpose of "gluing". How boring! It is much more fun to DRAW with hot glue.
Ok, if you are anything like me then you enjoy a glass (or a bottle) of wine from time to time....so here's what I did when I got bored one night and kept staring at empty glass wine bottles....
I took my big hot glue gun and drew designs on the surface of the bottle. On one (which was already a blue glass bottle and all the more fun for its hue) I drew little suns and random squigley designs. Hot glue is a good medium to work with because you can easily create depth on a surface by adding separate layers of glue. You can also fix mess ups rather easily due to the fact that you can MELT away your mistakes. It's the perfect drawing tool, you just have to get used to the stringiness. I then painted over the glue designs with bright yellow for the suns and some teal for the squigley background. These two colors mix together well and made a pretty green as well. I used inexpensive acrylic paint for this project. You can buy almost any color you can think of at an AC Moore or Michaels craft store.
For the second bottle I painted FIRST, simply because it was a green glass bottle and I wanted a different background color. I painted the background a bright pink and after it dried I used the hot glue to "draw" a tree design. (Hot glue makes for amazing tree bark, as you will see below on my other glue project.) I then used a bright lime green paint to highlight the tree design and add some cute swirls and strokes at the neck of the bottle. You could remove the labels if you like, but I like the character it gives the bottles. If you are not exactly the painting and drawing type this idea can be easily simplified to a bottle covered with geometric shapes, or simple bubbles/circles, or really any design you can think of! You certainly don't have to paint a scene from the Sistene. You could even add marbles or pretty beads and jewels now that I think of it.
And wa-la! You have two cute bottles to adorn your bookshelves or your kitchen counter tops and you have successfully recycled in the process. Now go have another bottle of wine. :)
Now...for the extra brave hot gluers....a 4 foot tall foam tree...covered in it!
I actually made this tree as a work project, for us to display our "standards of excellence". It would make a very pretty tree simply for decoration, but it also makes for a good matching game (which was our idea) since the snowflakes are strung on ribbon that hangs on push pins. Eventually we put words on the snowflakes and matching definitions on the branches.
I made this tree by cutting inexpensive foam board (like you would buy for a school project) into the shape of a tree. It took about 3 standard size foam boards to make the entire tree, and you can't tell from the picture above but it is pieced together in the center. The branches I did separately to avoid this "pieced" look. This is easy to see in the picture below. The foam board was originally white/tan, so after I cut all the pieces and assembled them with hot glue, and then added (my favorite) hot glue tree bark design, I took the tree home and spray painted it black. The result is a rough surface reminiscent of tree bark!
This took some time, as you can imagine, but it would have saved an enormous amount of time and effort if I would have had an exact-o knife nearby...but I work in a hospital so you can't just come walking in with blades and such. It was bad enough that I had a couple hundred degrees worth of glue burning in my office. So a good pair of scissors was basically sacrificed over a two day period....
I did add some foam board braces to the back of the tree just to help with the support of the branches. No one wants a floppy tree! And in case you were wondering, the snowflakes are foam and I bought them at Wal-mart...30 or so for around $5, and we used gift ribbon to make the curly ties for them. I am hoping to re-use this tree again....it would make a very neat Halloween decoration with the help of some creepy bones and pumpkins.
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