Saturday, February 26, 2011

Painted Wine Glasses

Kristin and I are throwing Jamie's bridal shower in June. Despite the fact that a few people HATE our plan, we're it in a local restaurant and asking people to buy their own lunch, because we are both pre-school teachers and thus have very little money to spend. Our invitations are made (and awesome), and so we've moved on to making our favors. We decided we wanted something nice since we're asking people to pay for their own food, so we decided to fill wine glasses with pink and silver Dove hearts. We also decided to decorate the wine glasses, to give them a little pizzaz. We thought what we bought to do the glass was glaze, so we thought it would be fairly thin and we would just splatter paint them and call it a day. The paint turned out to be fairly thick, so we actually painted each of 25 wine glasses today. And they turned out COOL!
The enamel we used is Folkart Enamels in metallic silver, engine red, and wicker white which we bought at Hobby Lobby. We had to make our own pink which we did by combining one jar of red with two jars of white. This took longer than we had anticipated and involved some trial and error. What we eventually decided was that it wasn't really worth putting the enamel back in the jar after we mixed it. Also, we achieved peppermint pink after about a 1/2 jar of red and couldn't get it much darker even when we added another 1/2 jar of paint.
We flipped the glasses upside down and painted them with fairly small paint brushes (liner, 1 and 2 point brushes mostly). Once they were all painted, we let them set for about an hour, and then started baking them to make the enamel set. To prevent breakage you put them in a cold oven and then turn it to 350 degrees. Once the oven achieves temp. bake for another 30 minutes, then turn off the heat and allow the oven to cool before removing the glasses.
Overall, I think the enamel was really easy to use, and worked out if not exactly how we thought, exactly how we wanted. What do you think?




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