Who doesn’t know the iconic shaped Mateus bottles?
They seem to appeal to everyone and have been used as lamp bases for a long time, I remember when I worked in the Art & Craft department of Turtles, barely a Saturday went by without someone coming in with a newspaper wrapped parcel…. they would unwrap their Mateus bottle and say “We’ve come up with the great idea to make a lamp out of this!”
The elderly manager got so fed up he used to hand over the lightfitting adapter and lampshade frame and say “These are all you want, pay around the corner, good-bye!” or when they were standing looking bemused at the mountain of lampshade frames, he’d shout out “The 8″ drum fits that bottle!”
I feel quite sorry for those poor people now – they thought they were being so original!

So, when my friend Caroline asked if I’d like to decorate a couple of these bottles for her to use as candle sticks in the garden, I leapt at the chance.
Of course if she likes the design and wants to keep them in house, they can easily be made in to rather attractive lamps…….

Here’s what I did.
As Caroline is a very keen and successful gardener I decided to go with a leaf design, so I got out my Pebeo Glass Paints. I kept to green, turquoise and yellow.

Firstly I painted leaf shapes, starting from the bottle of the bottle in the green paint.

These paints are touch dry very quickly so while doing the second bottle in the same design, the first was drying ready for the next colour.
If you are using different glass paint colour without the outliner, just give the colours a few minutes to dry – unless you want to blend them of course!
Then I painted one half of each leaf with a mix of the green paint with a little yellow paint.

Next step was to paint the other half in a darker green, I added a little of the turquoise paint to the green.

Lastly, with yellow, I added a few leaf veins to add a little definition to each leaf.
And, thats it!

Hope she likes them…
I’ll be back soon,
Love Rosie.