Handmade Christmas: Etched Glass Candy Jar

Are you Handmade Christmased out yet? This is our next to last post!

And I just realized I never took the after photo. Eep. Oh, well.

When my kids go to my parents’ house, the first thing they do is make a beeline for the candy. Grampy ALWAYS has candy. But Grampy doesn’t have a candy jar, so we made one for him.

To make this I used Armour Etch ($12-14), painter’s tape, an X-acto knife and a glass container we had in storage. I originally bought the container several years ago to store cereal or laundry soap, after seeing them on the ever-fab blog Young House Love, which is also where I got the idea for glass etching. However, this particular one has been sitting in storage for about two years, so why buy a new one when this one was perfect?

I used myfonts.com to find a G I liked that wasn’t too thin, then I enlarged the window (on a Mac hold the Command and + keys) until it was as large as I wanted for the jar. I traced it onto a piece of paper from my screen, like it was a light box, then cut the G out, traced it to several strips of tape that I’d already stuck to the glass and cut it out. The next step is coating on the Armour Etch, which I did very liberally and with a foam brush. Let it sit for 5-7 minutes, then rinse and you’re done!

(When I explained to Jenna that the G was for Grampy because it was Grampy’s candy, she told me to make sure I didn’t forget the K for “kandy!” lol.)

Of course you can’t give someone an empty candy jar, right? I filled it with several bags of various candy and gave it to him. Incidentally, my sister-in-law Kelly gave them a cookie jar that is the same only bigger. Great minds …

The breakdown: The jar itself wasn’t very expensive for me as I only bought the Armour Etch (10 oz. bottle for $12-14; it goes a long way), but the jar was purchased at Walmart for $6-8 in 2008 (ours still has them); I used about five bags of candy which varied from $2-5 each

The verdict: I would TOTALLY do this again! It turned out looking SO great, but very subtle. I was SO excited about it.

Tagged: candy jar, christmas, glass etching, handmade