Glitter Jar Catastrophe

My story today starts out with great intentions.

In 2016, I decided to make glitter calming jars for the kids in my family for Christmas. At the time it was 6 kids. I also wanted them to have a couple choices of colors, so I think I made 8 or 9 big jars and I made 2 smaller ones for my niece who was about 11 months old.

I got some glass jars at Michaels, which really was my biggest mistake right there. They do look very nice, but they’re too heavy, and more importantly, they break. Michaels now sells plastic bottles just for this application, so I’d say go for that.

I got like 25 kinds of glitter, of different colors and sizes. I recall there were some snowflakes too.

The recipe I used was: 1 tube of glitter glue, 20% of the jar’s volume of Elmer’s clear glue, 80% of the volume of hot water (to melt the glitter glue and aid in mixing the other glue), an optional few drops of food coloring, and a few different types of glitter. Making ~10 of these required a huge amount of supplies. Each one used up just short of one bottle of the clear glue. And I just had so much glitter.

After the water cooled down, I topped off the jars with water and glued on the lids with Gorilla Glue. I like that glue for this because it requires water to cure, so I could kind of use the mixture itself to help out, instead of trying to keep the area dry.

Now for the catastrophe. I lived out of town at the time, so I carefully packed all the jars in paper and put them in plastic bags. I toted them all the way to my mom’s house and lugged them inside so they wouldn’t freeze. The time came to bring them to my dad’s house where all the kids were. It was Christmas morning and unbeknownst to me it had just sleeted. I took one step outside with all the jars in hand and slipped and fell on my butt. That is nothing new as I slip and fall on ice about twice a month n the winter. But all but one big jar and one little jar totally shattered. Glitter everywhere on the sidewalk and on my clothes. I still saw glitter on the sidewalk up until the next summer because it was mixed with glue.

The one big jar that survived was my least favorite one that I had contemplated not even bringing. The small one was fine.

A secondary blow occurred a few months later when I was looking through some boxes that were stored in the garage. I discovered a small glitter jar I had made as a sample. Only it had frozen and shattered and glitter glue was all over the contents of that box.

I don’t think I’ll do this craft again anytime soon.