The Not-So-Simple Bottle Project

It all started with a bottle, a simple bottle...

Everyone knows it was my birthday last week (how could you miss it?).  After my party I saw that there were all these little coke bottles left over.  They were so cute I did not want to waist them, so I started this little project.  Well it turns out it was not so little.

My first mistake was to try to do something the right way.  Here are my supplies: 

I decided to use ceramic acrylic.  I tried to find out the difference between ceramic acrylic and regular acrylic but there was very little info on my - usually favorite - google search.  Turns out ceramic acrylic dries REALLY hard after you bake it (yup I had to bake them...twice).

I did find ceramic acrylic paint (at Michael's where else?), but it came in these tiny little bottles (more bottles I'm telling you they are the curse of me).  I got just one bottle of paint, not knowing what it was going to be like.  I tried pouring it into my coke bottle and just got a big mess.  Today I threw away the poor coke bottle because there just was no saving it.

The ceramic acrylic expanded in the baking process (bake them or wait 21 days, who would do that?) and dripped out the top.  It also pulled away from the inside, making theses weird marks.  The lesson learned? Water down your ceramic paint, it will go a lot farther and be easier to use.

With the rest of my bottles I used the watered down version, but after I baked the first batch these were not so great either.  The paint had all dripped to the bottom of the bottle in the oven (it does not help that my oven does not keep a temperature, but I tried).  See the thick part in the bottom third?

To fix this I did another layer of ceramic paint.  That meant another trip to Michael's (30 minutes away).

This time I let the bottles dry upside down (I'm glad I did not have my cat yet).

I soon saw that the paint was dripping out the bottom, so to conserve paint I put them all upside down inside plastic cups.  I was getting a little silly at this point.  Jeff came in and saw the mess and just turned around and left.  I did end up conserving paint.  The extra paint was used for another project, but the jury is still out as to whether the other project will work either.

I baked this last batch of bottles (sounds funny don't you think?), and they came out pretty good. 

Next I had to tape them off.  This was another silly process and there was so much giggling coming from the dining room that Jeff had to investigate once again.

They look like strange shrouded figures right?  Maybe it's the fumes.

The tape and chalk board spray paint went off without a hitch.
They turned out great!

Except for one problem... you can't actually write on them with chalk.  The paint just scratches right off.  The chalk paint instructs you to use a special kind of chalk, and I just used some I found in Jeff's pockets (he's a teacher) so that might be the problem, or, I might have to wipe off the chalk board paint and go back to ceramic paint.  We'll see.  For now, I like how they turned out, but you might see them in a new incarnation soon.