St. Patricks Day Arts and Crafts Project

Remember how I said that on Wednesday Allison and I would be having an arts and crafts afternoon and would be making these? WELL WE DID!

 I didn't print out the "elixir of life" things that Design Sponge had, mostly because I didn't have access to a color printer.
I used Jameson and Bushmills whiskeys because they're Irish, and stickers because I got excited when I saw them.

 The most difficult part of this process was to get the labels off. We tried soaking the labels with goo be gone, but that barely worked, so we tried scraping them off. That worked, but was very time consuming and with my xacto knife I had to be very careful not to cut myself in the fingers or chest.

Allison got a bit frustrated, so I suggested she try the Bushmills bottles to see if they were easier. They were. Perhaps it was the fact that they are square with flat sides and the Jameson bottles are round, but the labels on the Bushmills bottles just came right off and the adhesive came off with some goo be gone.

After all the bottles were cleaned, we washed them with soap and drank some tea.  :)

 Then came the decorating. I tried to make little hearts and trace them on the gold paper. They came out looking fairly stupid, and not at all looking like shamrocks. :(

 Then I tried tracing the green stickers, this looked decent, but didn't look nearly as good as the individual hearts Allison cut out from tracing a heart template and putting together in a shamrock form.

You can see here just how those turned out and the differences between them all.

 Eventually we got a streamlined way of making the heart shamrocks. I traced the gold hearts, and cut them out. Allison glued them in the shapes on the bottles, and cut out the tails (stems).

 I decided to put the gold shamrocks on the green bottles and green shamrocks on the gold bottles, that made the shamrocks pop just a little bit more. We used stickers on three sides of the gold Bushmills bottles and one of Allison's gorgeous heart shamrocks on the fourth side.

As you can see it was a bit of a mess, and we ended up going over the bottles with some goo be gone to get up the excess modge podge.

Ta Da! This is the finished product with the corks in the bottles, and little heart tags tied to the outside.

I think they're pretty cute. A little pointless, true, but I had a lot of fun making them with Allison. I'm thinking of putting them in a little basket as a decoration when I have some people over on Saturday for a St. Patrick's Day dinner.

If you think these are tacky or in bad taste I promise my mom will agree with you.