Painted Glass Jars

I mentioned in my last post that our guest bathroom redo is complete except for finding yellow decorations for the shelves. Well, finding yellow stuff is proving harder than I expected! I'm not dead-set on everything being yellow, but I want some bright "pops" of color in all that white. I figured I could find a yellow hand soap/toothbrush holder set and some yellow containers easily, but so far I keep striking out. 

Yesterday we went to Garden Ridge to pick up some glass containers to hold cotton balls and Q-tips. We found some pretty (and cheap - gotta love Garden Ridge!) glass jars with a crackled finish. I filled one with cotton balls and it was pretty enough, but certainly didn't "pop" against the shelves. 

I asked myself what my favorite bloggers would do... and they would paint it! First I tried painting it with a brush and it was a streaky mess, so I went to the Internet. I found several blogs and websites that showed how to paint the inside of glass mason jars and decided to use the same method. 

Squirt a bunch of paint into the jar. This was my first try, and it wasn't nearly enough. 

I ended up squirting almost an entire bottle of paint into the jar. It was an $0.89 bottle of craft paint, so no big deal. After squirting a lot of paint, roll/shake/swirl the jar to cover all the surfaces. This sounds easy, but it takes a while to get it to move around enough to coat every surface. 

Once the whole thing is covered in paint, turn it upside down over newspapers or cardboard that will soak up the dripping paint. It drips for a long time!

Finally, when it finishes dripping, I found that it helped to turn it right-side-up to dry. Here is a picture of the finished product!

And a picture of the two together on the shelves to show how much more "pop" the painted one provides. I've painted the larger jar too and am just waiting on it to dry!