Fake Stained Glass Bottles

You've probably all done this craft at some point in time. You take pieces of tissue paper, a bit of glue, and decoupage the paper onto a jar, bottle, or glass to make it look like stained glass. Easy, right? Anyone can do it. Well I came up with a way to take it to the next level.

The same basic principle is the same, but to make it look more like stained glass, I took some black construction paper, cut out designs, and decoupaged it on. Now I took the hard road when I did it. I put the tissue paper down first, arranging the colors pretty close to the design I wanted. I then drew out my design on the construction paper (eyeballing my tissue already down to get the placement right), and then cut it out and glued it on. This is definitely not recommended for anyone lacking spatial ability and hand-eye coordination.

The much easier method would be to do your design ahead of time and cut it out, so you can use it as a guide when you’re gluing the tissue paper down. Once all the tissue paper is decoupaged, then you can lay you’re design on top and glue it down. Make sure you do several layers of the mod podge (or watered down glue) to ensure your tissue is good and stuck, and your black design won’t just peel up. As you can see, the designs won't line up perfectly, and some of the colors will come outside the lines, but I actually like the look of it - kinda gives it that 50's/60s design charm.

This was a craft that the teens certainly enjoyed, but it is very hard to do if you have time constraints. I only had an hour to do this craft with them, and it was a little hard to get everything done. Quite a few shied away from doing the black paper design, but maybe if we had done this project over the course of two weeks, more of them would've been willing to do it.