Happy Friday!  

Easy peasy upcycling idea today for vintage looking plates you may have around the house or find for next to nothing at a thrift shop or flea market.

This is inspired by plates I saw on “Visually Vod” (scroll down to see the Precious Products plates).      Start off by taping off the area of the plate you don’t want painted.

Spray paint (I know, not so eco, but it really works the best here) some “metal” paint on top.   A little goes a very very long way here, folks.

And voila!   Gold stripes.    Okay, this isn’t the same as the Visually Vod one, but this was my first attempt.  I think I need to “dip” half the plate in gold or do some kind of silhouette.   The point is, this took :30 seconds to attempt and in my crazy world, I give that two thumbs up.

There are bags full of empty water/soda/energy drink plastic bottles sitting in my craft room for a group of stylists to transform into something amazing for our new book Upcycling.

As I’m going through the bags, I could not help but be attracted to different bottles for their fun shapes and modern designs.   So, naturally, I filled them with concrete.

Here’s a Coke bottle that I filled with Quick-crete that I picked up from Lowe’s.  It’s basically just powdered concrete that I mixed in about 6 times as much water than directed on the packaging.     Poured it straight into the bottle using a funnel and let it dry.

Carefully—-key word here, folks—-scored the outside of the bottle using an X-acto knife to peel off the plastic…

As I’m peeling away, you can see that the concrete really got great impressions from the bottle.   This Coca Cola logo looks crisp and sharp!

Can you guess these shapes?

In addition to the Coca Cola bottle, here’s an Evian one and a Ginger Ale soda bottle.

These heavy concrete bottles will be used as door stoppers throughout the house.  So easy and kinda fun!

Okay, not really.   Actually, I don’t recommend mixing drinking and crafting together.  Sure, it sounds fun…until that hot glue gun goes awry.

Anyway, I call it Drunk Crafting because I had this weird idea to collect all those mini hotel liquor bottles and upcycle them into something.    I was inspired by my trip to St. Thomas and saw these gorgeous white coral collections and thought those could be the inspiration for this project.

I started by basically going around NYC and asking hotel housekeepers to save the liquor bottles guests were throwing out.    I arranged them by height: a half bottle of Absolut for the middle, Grey Goose and Belvedere for the mid tier and the Absolut bottles upfront.  All Vodka!

Glued them all together using a hot glue gun that I picked up from Lowe’s.  Let me tell you about this glue gun: it works.    It’s not one of those craft store glue guns where the hot glue cools the second you squeeze the handle; here, it comes out blazing hot and really gets the job done.

Anyway, once the bottles were glued together into one big piece, I took some puffy t-shirt paint and added it to the sides to give it a little bit of coral texture.

Three coats of creamy paint later, here’s my upcycled liquor bottle collection.   Now, what on Earth will I do with it?    I’m thinking of using it as a stacked bud vase, where each little bottle will hold a white flower.    Once I get around to actually finding time to leisurely pick flowers in my non-existent meadow, I’ll take a picture!

Do you remember the blog post I did on turning a Pellegrino bottle, some chopsticks and diffuser oil into a DIY Diffuser Hack project?

Yep, it involved taking a piece of string soaked in nail polish remover and wrapping it around the neck of the bottle, lighting it ON FIRE and then quickly dropping it into a bucket of ice water to snap the top half of the bottle off.    I can’t imagine why hundreds of you aren’t trying to attempt this at home right now?    You mean to tell me lighting things on fire and exploding glass aren’t on your list of “been there, done that” craft projects?

Anyway, I have to agree with the comments that maybe there’s a better and less dangerous way.     How about this?

I have these mini glass bottles of lemon Pellegino soda bottles in my fridge, had one the other day, and decided to upcycle it.   Using regular old craft glue, I wrapped twine all around the bottle.    Shaved the Chinese food takeout chopsticks (they are bamboo, so they are porous and perfect as diffusers) with a pencil sharpener.  Filled the bottle with some delicious essential oil, put the chopsticks and voila!  Diffuser for the office.

I’ve been reading and hear from my crafty friends that there’s an easy and cheap way to make DIY shrinky dinks right at home.   Remember shrinky dinks as a child?  You drew on them, popped them in the oven, and watched them miraculously shrink down in size?    (Side note: It’s amazing how little it took to entertain me as a child compared to what it takes with kids today, right?)

So, my friends said you could take any #6 marked clear plastic—think salad bar or sandwich take out containers—and use it as your material base for homemade Shrinky Dinks.  

Here’s a bread container I cut up into the letters LOVE.    I put a dollar bill in the pic so you can see how large the cut outs are.

And here’s one where I just used a Sharpie to color in a bullseye.  What was I making?  No idea…. just seeing if this crazy idea actually works.

Onto a sheet of aluminum foil and into a toaster oven that’s already on at 350 degrees.   Literally, it takes a few seconds inside the hot oven for this project to work.

And there ya have it.    The shrunk down instantly from crunchy, flexible plastic into hard-as-nails opaque plastic.    Within seconds, the plastic curled into a messy ball and then uncurled itself inside the oven flat.       I’m thinking luggage tags, dog tags, charms and gift tags for this project. 

Seconds to make with some fun results.  Right?