Decorative Jars

Time

Art & Crafts

4 3 2 1 Early-Mid Stages

Benefits

Participants

Group Activity

What you need

Glass jars
Scraps of decorative material (roughly cut into 3cm-4cm squares)
PVA glue

Intro

Got lots of jam and pickle jars stacking up in the cupboard? Brilliant! We’ll need them for this activity, as we’re going to transform them into decorative containers using scraps of material and glue. You might want to turn yours into a vase for flowers, a pot for pens or a case for odds and ends (just make sure you hang onto the lids)

The Activity

Lay the jars out in the middle of the table and ask each person to choose the one they would like to decorate
If time, you could have a quick guessing game, asking people what they think was in the jar or what they would have liked to have been in the jar (e.g. their favourite kind of jam!)
Sort the material scraps in colour-coded piles
Invite each person to choose a selection of scraps
Glue a small section of the jar and stick on one piece of material
Glue another small section and glue another piece of material
Keep layering the material around the jar until it’s covered, and the pieces are overlapping
Paint another layer of glue over the whole jar and leave to dry
Enjoy using them to hold all sorts of things or give them away as gifts