Crafting Fail

When I thought about sharing BG and mine's latest craft I realized that bloggers rarely post about their crafting failures.  With a interwebs filled with tutorials and inspiration we miss out on one part of the learning process, the failures. 

I recently had a failure.

Yesterday was National Teachers' Day and we celebrated like all the other kids in America.  The room mom and I got together and decided to have each child give our teacher a rose and a short note saying why they liked her as their teacher.  Later I came up with the idea of decorating a jar to put all the notes inside of.  Here is my original inspiration from the interwebs but not what I actually did. 

I wanted to do this inexpensively with supplies that I already owned.  I have fruit jars, I love to save glass food jars and swear they will come in handy one day.  I have some water-based paints.  I have seen people paint onto glass using a water based paint.  My original idea was to paint stripes on the jar and have something nice on the lid.

I went to Michaels and picked up a few supplies.  I didn't see any nice paper that I could mod podge onto the top of my jar so I picked up a simple ribbon and badge to glue on instead.  I also picked up some nice letter stickers and a roll of zigzag glitter tape.  At $6 for 3 yards of zigzag tape I later decided to just return it the next time I was at Michaels.

Plan A
I used painter's tape to define our strips and BG painted a couple of coats on the jar.  After it was completely dry and we peeled the tape off a lot of the paint came off with it.  Grrr.  When I tried to clean it off I realized that the paint was easily removed with just a little bit of water.  Double grrr.

Plan B
I tried to use a primer and have a paint+primer spray paint that already owned.  I had ran out of white and had to use black.  It's okay, makes the jar look a little more masculine.  I retaped the jar, spray painted it and then BG painted it again.  The paint stayed on while removing the tape but I had to be careful.  In the end I didn't like the dark paint under the pretty blue paint.  Blah grrr.  Oh and after I decided to not use this jar I washed it.  The paint still washed off with water but not cleanly enough to be able to use the jar again.

If I ever try this again I am going to go straight to a spray paint in the color I want or spend the money on the acrylic glass paints.  I don't understand where I went wrong other than in paint choice.  But I have seen people used water based paints on things like flower vases.  Flower vases.  You kinda have to have water with a flower vase so wouldn't the paint just wash off?

Plan C
In the end I went with Plan C.  I hot glued some ribbon around the edge of my jar lid and glued the You Are Awesome button on top.  Then I used the $6 zigzag tape and letter stickers to decorate a simple, clean jar.  The teacher was impressed. 

Here are the two jars side by side.  I like the Plan C jar best, but I think it's because I couldn't get the other one to work.  I think that my original plan had a lot of potential so I may try it again some other time.  Maybe those painted vases?

Here is the jar with all the little notes that the kids wrote out.  Sorry about the bad pictures.  It was yesterday morning and the sun shining directly on the table so I had to close the blinds.