Alpine Tea Light Holders

Today was a perfect December day, cold and clear with a colourful sunrise and sunset. Exactly the kind of sky and weather I was thinking about when I made these jam jar tea light holders. 

They are very easy and a lot of fun to make, and I've put together a quick tutorial for you.

You'll need:

• Jam jars (I used the larger ones, the kind mayonaise comes in.)
• PVA glue.
• Tissue paper.
• An old plastic pot and paintbrush.
• Tea light candles.

Make sure your jars are clean-ish, but don't worry about any glue from labels left on the outside as it'll all be covered. Cut up your tissue paper into strips. I started with a sheet of each colour and used all the white and only very small amounts of the other colours.

In the plastic bowl, mix one part PVA glue with one part water and mix well. I believe Mod Podge would work in the same way here, although I've never used it. Using the paintbrush, paint a layer of this mixture over the entire jam jar.

Start layering on your strips of tissue paper, going over each layer with another coat of the gluey mixture. I found I needed to use loads of white, but very little of the stronger colours. I wanted mine to look like winter sunsets, so planned my colours accordingly.

You might want to leave it to dry between stages to see if you need to add any more layers of a particular colour, especially the paler ones. Also, I found that some of the stronger colours bled a little. Then I added my mountains and trees, slowly layering up little tissue paper shapes until I was fairly happy with what I had. I badly wanted to do a cable car and a chalet, but this kind of craft is fairly rough around the edges and I thought they'd just look like messy blobs. So I stuck to trees and mountains on a snowy hill with a setting sun behind them. When they were finished and dry, I gave each jar one more coat of the glue mixture, just to seal them and act as a kind of varnish.

I really like how they came out. They say Winter without screaming Christmas, and you know how I do love a winter sky. And I enjoyed doing some quiet, festive crafting on a slow afternoon too, even better.

I wanted the sunsets to glow when they were lit, and this is what happens. Such a cosy effect!

Of course you can do anything with the tissue paper. The kids just enjoyed layering stripes of colour onto the jam jars and that works just as well too.