December 17th - Potions

No Harry Potter themed Christmas tree would be complete without some Potions Ornaments!
I had found a few little old glass bottles/vials in the basement of my 108 year old house, and bought some off eBay and in a crafting store. It was quite a challenge to find corks for the old glass bottles. Actually I ended up taking the corks from some of the new bottles, discarding those in favour of the old bottles, they really look so much more authentic than the new ones.

Lots of inspiration and tutorials on how to make beautiful, glittery, liquid potions can be found online, but I decided that liquid potions were not the way to go, considering how I plan these ornaments to last for years and years. I'm just afraid that any liquids would leak or dry out or become discoloured in storage between Christmases. So after some searching and thinking I decided to go with glitter glue for my potions. Not the liquid kind, obviously, but glue-gun glitter glue.
I bought a cheap 7mm glue gun and a lot of 7mm glitter glue sticks on eBay (please note that links  may expire with time, and they will not be updated).

Now, getting the glue nicely into the bottles turned out to be much more difficult than I had anticipated. You see, I was a bit impatient, and didn't heat the glue stick long enough inside the glue gun before I started squirting it into the bottle. The result was that the glue wasn't liquid enough, and didn't float nicely into every nook and cranny of the bottle. And it hardens FAST after it leaves the glue gun! I tried to remedy this by microwaving the bottle, but the temperature didn't get high enough to make the glue liquid. For the next bottles I therefore had to be much more patient, leave the glue to melt long enough, and just add small amounts of liquid glue to the vials at a time. Some of the bottles had very small openings, and that too made it difficult to fill them properly before the glue started hardening. All in all I was a little disappointed that my idea wasn't as good and as easy to execute as I'd thought, but with this you get no second chances, and I just had to settle for a less than perfect result.

Thankfully, I could cover up the worst messes with potion labels, because of course potions bottles needs to have labels! I googled and found lots of free, printable labels online, I'm not posting all of the labels right here because I'd have to give credit. But I used quite a lot of these nice labels from Over the Big Moon. I resized, printed and cut them out, and attached them to the potion bottles with Mod Podge. I also covered the labels with a protective layer of Mod Podge.

To further cover up some of the imperfections I tied pretty ribbons or burlap string around the necks of some of the bottles. As with the House Points Hourglasses I fastened the corks with contact cement, screwed eyelet screws in the middle of the corks and made some swirly ornament hooks for hanging. I debated whether to make the bottles look aged and distressed like in this cool tutorial, but thought they'd look prettier as ornaments the way they are. Here are a few images of the finished result.

Note that the Fur of Werewolf is actual fur from our two miniature wirehaired doxies!