The Craftiest Workshop

I had an old string of outdoor Christmas lights where the paint had almost all come off due to being left up too long. It was left on one of the houses we moved into. I removed all the bulbs and washed them using a scrubber to get the rest of the paint off. I knew that I could do some sort of craft with the bulbs. They have been sitting in this bucket for a long time.

I saw this poem on Pinterest and thought it would be a nice gift idea to go along with a painted light bulb.

I tried to paint some of the bulbs with a paint brush and noticed right away that it was hard to get a smooth look. My next thought was to dip each bulb in white paint to get a base layer. I did a number of the bulbs this way, and I do plan to paint them with colour, but I wanted to try something that would adhere better to the bulbs in one go.

I went to some thrift stores on my last trip to Edmonton and grabbed some bags of used nail polish. I tried to find a range of colours. I cut pieces of toilet paper roll and put them in a shoebox. Having the toilet paper roll between the nail polish bottles keeps them from clinking together and potentially breaking.

In order to paint the bulbs, I needed to come up with a way to dry them. I placed a piece of bamboo across two scrap pieces of 2X6. We have a roll of hanging wire for pictures so I snipped some of that for each bulb, wrapping around the metal part and creating a small hook to hang on the bamboo. I also used some rusty wire we had lying around from another project.

I should mention that if you use nail polish to paint anything, you should be in a well ventilated area. I was working in the garage and it was +5° so I had the garage door open.

I painted each bulb with a different colour of nail polish. I found that the solid bold colours went on really well. Ironically, the Sally Hansen brand of polish, which I think is from Dollarama, worked the best. Here is the result after the first coat.

The polish with glitter needed three coats. The one on the far right was a blue that was quite chunky so I just painted it and put a creamy coat over it.

Here is the result after a second coat.

You can see that I tried to paint a small wooden heart with a glittery red polish.
I quite like how that turned out.

The other technique I tried was pouring swirls of three colours into a container of water. The container had to be bigger than whatever you dip. I used a thin plywood square and dipped it into the polish floating on the water. You have to have fairly runny polish for this to work. If too big a drip drips into the water, the nail polish sinks. You also have to work fairly quickly or the polish on top of the water starts to firm up. The other thing I noticed were small water bubbles left in the polish that adhered to the wood. With the right polish in complementing colours, these would make nice coasters or small pieces of art.

Two of the bulbs still remained translucent so I decided to try to add some colours to them…thus the marbled looking ones. Here are all the bulbs I painted along with the heart.

Overall, aside from being a smelly project, I quite like how nail polish goes onto glass and wood. The smell does take a few days to dissipate from the object as it fully dries. The next thing I would like to paint with nail polish is some ceramic pots to place in my fairy garden. I want to see how it holds up in the rain.