DIY: Re-Purposing Holiday Lights

I mentioned in my Thrift Shop Challenge blog that I was accumulating glass jars to use for a decor project in our apartment. It's finally time for me to post about the project!!

Here's the finish look, and then I'll go into the probably un-necessary steps I took to put it together:

During the months of December and January, a yoga store on 4th Ave was displaying something similar to this along their entire storefront window, using dozens and dozens of mason jars of different sizes. I thought the idea was so pretty and since it only required two "ingredients" - glass jars and holiday lights - I could not pass up trying to recreate the design at home. We even had a perfect surface for the project, on top of a wooden dresser in our bedroom.

And so, several weeks back, I began holding onto our empty glass peanut butter and pasta sauce jars, as well as any other miscellaneous glass jars we emptied.

To make sure they were extra spotless, I took care to soak them and clean them well to remove all of the sticky residue left behind by their labels:

You can remove any additional stubborn sticky stuff from the jars by rubbing it off with a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol.

My neighbor even donated a few actual mason jars to the project! Once she gave me those, I finally felt like I had enough jars to set them all up with the holiday lights on the dresser top.

I took some time to arrange and re-arrange all of the jars until I found a configuration that I liked. That was probably the most difficult part of this entire project! After that I just began carefully stuffing each jar with the strand of lights, one jar at a time. Be careful not to break any of your tiny little light bulbs on the glass jars while you're doing this. You'll really get pissed if that happens.

I ended up leaving a couple of the smaller jars empty, which seemed to work out fine and still looks nice. I love the finished look!

This provides so much more light to our bedroom - it's wonderful! And, if you ask me, it's a pretty classy way to be an adult and use holiday lights in your decorating. When was the last time outside of a dorm room that you thought holiday lights were a good year-round decor decision?

Let me know if you like this or if you try it out as well :)