Bewitching Bottles

I love to decorate my kitchen windowsill with bottles. You can see here that I used to collect different colors and change them out for various holiday/seasons. After I redecorated the kitchen/living room those colored bottles didn’t seem to work any longer.

Until Halloween…Then anything goes, right? For the last few Halloweens, I’ve been looking at bottles at the craft store that have spooky labels on them. I never bought them because I always thought they were too expensive. So this year I decided I was going to make my own.

Late August early September I emptied a small bottle of pinoli nuts. I liked the shape and at first I thought it would make a nice tea light holder. Then right after that my husband emptied a glass bottle for one of his meds. Then I realized I could use both of them for something fun and the challenge grew. A quick look around the pantry and in the frig and I realized that in no time I could manage to empty out several bottles and use them to make my “Potion” bottles.
Once I had a few bottle together I started getting them ready. I washed them out and removed the labels.


For the more resistive labels, I used cooking oil on a paper towel to loosen the adhesive. After they were all label free, washed and dry it was time for some paint. I have seen some people use acrylic paints to decorate their own colored bottles but they all seem to look streaky. I heard that oil based paint might work better so off I went to the home improvement store.

I bought a half pint can of high gloss black oil base paint and I was good to go. I poured about a third of the paint into one of the bottles and rolled it around the inside. Then poured the rest out into the next bottle and so on until all the bottles were coated with paint.

While the paint was drying I got started on some labels. I wanted to find some brownish, parchment looking paper but didn’t want to pay for it so I used regular white paper. I found a list of “ingredients” by googeling “witches brew”. I found a few fonts that looked the part and printed them out.

To give the paper and aged look I used shoe polish. First some tan and them around the edges with brown. I tore the label and used a match to burn the edges. Glued them onto the bottles and lined them up on the windowsill.

Now it looks like all I need is a cauldron and I’m ready to get started on a ghoulish concoction.

Here’s a list of the “ingredients” that I came up with…

Old Hag Cackle Extract
Vanishing Cream
Mummy Dust
Black of Night
Eye of Newt
Toe of Frog
Wool of Bat
Toil and Trouble Tonic
Ear of Troll
Dragon’s Breath
Hell Broth
Vanishing Cream
Mermaid Scales
Poison # 26
(Only use after midnight)

Not all the bottles were painted. I kept a few clear so I could fill them with different things. The poison bottle has purple colored water,

the mummy dust is a mix of salt and pepper.

and the hell broth has red colored water.



Did you guess what any of the bottles were used for originally?

From left to right…

Blue Curacao
Sambuca
Green Olives
Porto
Red-hot sauce
Florastor
Tonic water
Capers
Tequila
Pine nuts
Sesame oil
Taco sauce
Red-hot sauce #2


Have a fun Halloween!!