About 3 weeks ago, I posted a sneak peek of my project for my dad's Christmas present. Today I would like to reveal it to you.
This is what this project was from the beginning. Scroll down to see how I transformed this into an adorable festive witch.
Yes, I know it seems weird to be posting a picture of a witch craft right after Christmas, but there is a little bit of a background on this one.
Ever since I was little, I have always known that Halloween was Dad's holiday and Christmas was Mom's holiday. My dad has always gotten a kick out of Halloween decorations that were goofy, not so much gory. Since my dad has loved helping me with the lighting of my crafts, I decided that for his present this year for Christmas, I wanted to make him a new Halloween decoration that he could have fun trying to light. The only problem I had was that the witch would need a hole in the back of her head so that the lights could go in the glass bowl, but the plug could still come out far enough to be plugged into an outlet. Well, I've never drilled a hole in glass before, so, to make sure I didn't ruin the glass, I did just hand him the clear, glass, fish bowl to drill a hole into. He did know I was making something for him, he just didn't know what.
So, since the process is still fresh in my mind, I am going to post instructions on how to make this Clay Pot Glowing Witch. I will also likely repost this next October when we are a little closer to Halloween.
Here are the products I used for this project and where I got them:
-1 small clay pot* (Dollar Tree - in-stock only during spring; Joann's)
-1 medium clay pot* (Ace Hardware)
-1 large clay pot* (Ace Hardware)
- 1 large clay pot base (Ace Hardware)
-1 large glass bowl* (Walmart)
- green, black, and orange acrylic paint (Walmart)
- clear spray paint or paint sealant (Walmart)
- skewer-- yes the kind you put food on (Walmart)
- burlap (Ace Hardware)
- white, black, orange, and green felt (Joann's)
- two large, white buttons (Walmart)
- Orange, thick yarn (Walmart)
- Lots of Hot Glue (Walmart)
- Lights (Walmart)
- black sharpie (Walmart)
- pipe cleaners-- a pack with silver and gold (Dollar Tree)
- glass drill bit and glass--Look up a tutorial on the internet before you try it!! (Amazon)
- black ribbon (Walmart)
- scissors (Walmart)
- sponge paintbrush (Walmart)
- strong sandpaper (Walmart)
- an old, dried out marker that no longer produces any ink or a small, or circle sponge (my closet; haha)
*At this point in time, I do not have exact dimensions of the clay pots, and so, use the candy canes next to the pot as a reference to the size of the pot.
As you can imagine, this project took quite a long time to make. My sister and I worked on it for a couple of days without stopping. Because of that, these instructions will likely be very lengthy. Also, because of the details in this project, it will take some descriptive instructions and I hope I am able to explain things well enough. If you have any questions, just leave them in the comment section below.
After you obtain the pieces for this project, begin by drilling a hole in a lower place of the bowl. I got this bowl at Walmart in the wedding decoration aisle. The glass was really weird, almost like it had a plastic layer to it, so be careful drilling the whole. Like I mentioned before, please make sure to watch tutorials online before you drill holes in glass items. If you do it wrong, it could break the glass, or worse, shatter the glass and injure you. It is a lot more simple then expected though, so don't be too afraid to learn how to do it. If you do not have the supplies to drill a whole, you can try to make the cord come out of the top of the bowl and the witch hat will just have to sit on top of the cord.
It is also important to note from this picture that the whole does not need to be very big. Just big enough for the light bulbs to be pushed in through it. Our lights actually came with a battery pack, so we just made sure that the cord was hanging down far enough for the battery box to be able to rest on the cupboard below the hole.
After drilling the hole, the next step that will take the longest is painting the inside of the bowl. There are many theories of how best to paint glass. Some will say to buy a special, expensive paint, and others will say to sandpaper the glass so that the paint has a rough surface to stick to. Now, what I did was just paint the inside with green acrylic paint and making sure to paint in nice strokes so that it looked nice and smooth on the outside. Look at the picture below to see what I mean about the paint strokes. Then, I just spray painted the inside of it with sealant so that it had a protecting layer to keep the paint from getting scratched off by the lights. This has seemed to work so far. The only problem that I found this was that the sealant smelled very strong and took forever to dry. Because it was Christmas time and very cold outside, it mostly had to dry out in the garage because the chemical smell was too strong in the house. It was giving us headaches. So please, keep that in mind. Don't subject yourself and those living with you to brain damage from the harmful chemical odors.
While the inside of the head is drying, begin working on base of the witch. I chose this dress design after looking through Pinterest and combining a whole bunch of other people's designs. I ended up with this cute, button-down dress with a collar. In order to make this work, I started by using a pencil to draw the collar and the line where the orange needed to go up to on the bottom part of the dress. I painted the black part first because I knew that if I messed up on the orange later, it would be easier to fix by just repainting black over it. After the main orange and black part was painted, then I did the same with the hat, drawing the lines where the orange part of the hat needed to go. The clay pot base and the small pot were painted straight black. Then, it was time for the polka-dots on the hat and on the dress. I did not feel good about free handing the polka-dots with a sponge brush, and so I found an old, dried out marker that no longer had any ink and I would just dip it in the black acrylic paint before each polka-dot. It was so much easier to free hand it this way then with a brush.
After the paint on the dress was all dried, I used a hot glue gun and glued these big, white buttons onto the front. I also decided to hot glue a sliver pipe cleaner to the top of the orange dress trim to add more to the dress. It took like 1 1/2 pipe cleaners to make it around that part of the pot. It took another 1 pipe cleaner to do the same with the hat.
Now that all the pieces to the hat were complete, we hot glued the large clay pot base, the medium clay pot, and the small clay pot together to make the hat, as shown above.
Next, we decided to add arms and legs. The arms were nothing more than a sleeve-shaped piece of black felt being glued onto an armed-shaped piece of green felt. You can use some sort of writing utensil to draw on the felt to make sure you have the shape you want before cutting out the pieces. Look at the picture below to see how mine turned out. I honestly just free cut my first one and then traced it to make the second arm. Make sure that the arms both have the thumb pointing up. Don't give her a backwards hand! :)
For the legs, I just wrapped orange felt around a pipe cleaner and hot glued it into place, putting the glued seam on the back of the leg. I left a piece of the pipe cleaner sticking out so that it could be bent 90 degrees to be the foot. The pipe cleaner was perfect because it allows the legs and feet to bend, depending on where you place her for display. In the pictures above, she was just placed on my counter and I could bend her legs to fit the edge of the counter or I could just bend them straight out. For her shoes, I just cut 2 pieces of felt that mirrored each other and glued them together on the bent piece on pipe cleaner. Look at the picture below to see the feet and legs in more detail. For the stripes on the legs, I just used a black sharpie and free handed the stripes.
After the legs and shoes were done, I used hot glue and glued them at the bottom of the pot in the inside.
Next, the Broom! I used my sisters help to decide how we did the broom. She was playing with some scrap burlap that I had from another project and started un-weaving the burlap and cutting them into pieces. After cutting enough of them, she had created the bushy part of the broom. We cut the pointed ends of a skewer (yes, like the ones you use to make kabobs) off and tried our best to glue the burlap strands to the skewer. We used a gold pipe cleaner to hold better hold the strands to the skewer, adding a lot of hot glue where the pipe cleaner was going. Was it was in place, we added more hot glue to the top and bottom of the pipe cleaner just to make sure that it was all secure.
There are many more ways you could make the broom, whether you wanted to use yarn and a dowel stick or just try to purchase a mini one online, it's up to you! This is just how we did ours.
In order to make the broom stay in the witches hand, I attached the fingers of the witch to the side of the dress with just a drop of hot glue. This allows the broom to just hand loosely in her arms.
Now, the face. I decided to use my more typical face on the witch than try to copy one off Pinterest and I like the way it turned out! While doing the face, keep in mind that the face needs to be on the opposite side of where you drilled the whole in the glass. I started by cutting two, even circles in white felt for the eyes. Then, I cut two smaller pieces of black felt out for the black part of the eye. I positioned the black on the white the way I wanted and then hot glued them in place. Then, for the nose, I used a pencil to draw out the shape that I wanted, which is just like shown below. I used black sharpie to outline the nose to accentuate it and then I drew a simple circle on it for a wart.
For the mouth, I just free-handed the smile from black felt and used a small square of white felt to make a tooth. I just glued the tooth to the back of the smile. It's kind of hard to see it in the pictures, but I really love what the tooth added to her face. Once all 3 parts were ready to glue on, I tried to place them as best as possible before gluing them down. The slippery surface just makes it kind of difficult to keep them in place while trying to place.
Once all the pieces of the face were glued on, I glued the head onto the clay pot. This was hard because the glue peels right off if you just directly hot glue the glass onto the pot. So, we had to rough up the glass with some pretty strong sandpaper so that the hot glue had an uneven surface to stick onto.
Last, but not least, the hair! I will not lie, this was probably the most difficult part of this project. While I was painting the clay pot, I had my sister cutting pieces of yarn all the same length.
After there was quite a good lock of cut pieces, then we
cut a few more that were like half the length of the rest to be bangs.
Gluing the hair is where it gets tricky. I would line up strands of hair side by side
between my two fingers. After I had like 5ish lined up, I would put a line of
glue on the underside of the hat and press the tops of the strands down on the
line of glue, using the side of the scissors so that I didn’t burn my
fingers. I just continued that for quite
a while, making sure that there was quite a lock of hair on each side of the
head. I didn’t worry too much about
getting hair on the back of her head since no one would really see it and it
allows for more light to glow out the back.
When I was down with both sides of the main hair, I lined up the hair
for the bangs and put them across the front on the underside of the hat. But, the bangs are a little more to the side,
so I made sure not to glue them all the way across the front, just more on the
side that I wanted the bangs to be on.
After the hairs are all glued on and in place, I put the hat
on the witch to make sure that everything was laying correctly. Originally, I had tried to glue the hat on
glass bowl; however, this proved to be very difficult, so we decided that it
would stay pretty well if we just set the hat on and didn’t permanently glue it
down. This also proved to be easier when
storing the witch in a box. We didn’t
have to find such a tall box.
If the hair is all laying the way you want it to, you can
then begin to work her hair. After
trying to braid the hair and failing at it, I decided that I just wanted two
pigtails on the sides. I gathered the
hair up with my fingers about where I wanted the ribbon to hold the hair. Then, I held the hair as my sister tied it
with black ribbon. This is shown in the
picture below. After the first one was
tied into place, we did the same on the other side, making sure that it was
even with the first one.
Once everything is in place and looking the way you want,
you can decide on what kind and color of lights you want to use. We just bought simple, bead LED lights at
Walmart (after-Christmas sales on lights are great).
We then pushed the lights through the hole in the back of
the witch’s head. Another nice thing
about not gluing on the hat is that you can bend the light strand around the
way that you want inside the head to make the lighting balanced.
Once you are done with the lights, the witch is
complete! As you can tell from the
length of this, it is a very detailed process, but I was having fun every step
of the way. Thank you so much for
reading this article and for all of the positive feedback! If you liked this project, you can hit the
blue “Follow” button in the top, left side of the blog for much more! Also, click the link below in the footer to
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Again, thanks for joining me today! If you have any questions, please feel free
to leave them in the comments below. Have
a great day and stay tuned for more to come soon!
