June Guest - Lucy Edmondson - An Altered Bottle

I was so thrilled to be asked to Guest for Happy Daze this month, and for the first of my three contributions I have made this altered bottle. I wanted to go for a giant perfume bottle look. It started life as a glass bubble bath bottle like this:-

After removing all the labels, I painted it with a pinky beige acrylic paint and then stamped it with the Prima en francais script stamp in Victorian Velvet Distress Ink. I then used the pattern stamp from the Artistic Outpost 'Jane's Countryside' set and wrapped it around my hand and used a dabbing motion with Sepia ink, blotting it as I went along. These two stamps created more of a texture than a pattern. I dabbed a bit of Sepia on my finger and ran it around the raised circular part of the bottle to emphasize it. So at this stage it looked like this:-

These are the stamp sets I used:-

Next I used the Lost Coast Designs 'Labels' stamp set. I stamped the 'Violette Flor' perfume bottle label onto a cotton coaster (I buy these in packs of 10 from Poundland), using Sepia ink. I then used the other two perfume label stamps to make shrink plastic tags for the neck of the bottle, colouring them on the reverse with Pro Markers.

A better view of the shrink plastic tags:-

I adhered the coaster to the centre of the bottle and added a pressed Viola flower, sealed with a little matte medium. I wrapped a pocket watch style necklace from a car boot sale around the neck of the bottle and added the tags on jump rings. To finish off, I added a piece of lace to the neck, and some Liquid Pearls to the opening. I had planned on replacing the original stopper but it didn't look right. I was also going to add lots of little flowers etc, but Mr Less Is More told me to step away from the craft room!

I am using my finished bottle to hold artificial flowers:-