*BEST* THRIFT FLIP Ceramic & Glass Upcycle Techniques | EASY Boho Decor DIY Ideas

Hello YouTube fam, welcome or welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name's Tina and I make videos on lifestyle, home, and DIY projects every single week. For today's video, I thought it'd be fun to show you guys my favorite way to upcycle some ceramic or glassware pieces. Before we jump into the video, I want to give a huge thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring today's video. I'm learning so much on Skillshare and I can't wait to show you guys what I'm learning this month, so stay tuned for that. I feel like I'm always upcycling ceramic pieces on my channel, but they're kind of sprinkled throughout different videos, so unless you've seen every single one of my videos since the beginning of time, you probably have not caught all of them, so I thought it'd be super helpful just to put everything in one place so that you guys can refer back to it. So I went to Goodwill and found a few pieces, and this is a Goodwill that I've actually seen Mr. Kate shop at. I don't know how she has the best look there, but I really couldn't find that many pieces. However, the pieces I did find are things that you see at the thrift store all the time. So I picked up those pieces, and most likely you'll find similar pieces so that you can recreate some of these projects as well. Let me show a few items that I've gotten. This first one is one that you see all the time. It's kind of your typical flower bouquet vase. I feel like everyone and their mom has this. It's just a very classic, typical bouquet. It's made out of glass and it's a very traditional shape, but we are definitely going to upgrade it and make it a little bit more chic. And I'm really excited because this was just a couple of bucks, and it is pretty large. The next item I grabbed kind of reminds me of a chemistry flask, the way that the shape is, but hopefully we're going to change it into something a little bit more stylish. So as you can see, it's this gold color, and it looks a little bit more on the cheaper side, and that's one of the best things about going to the thrift store. You can find some items that you like the shape of, and you can always update the color to make it a little bit more stylish and fit in with your decor. So I don't know if you guys can tell, but there is a Pyrex logo here, and then you also have the millimeters. Barely see it, but this definitely is a flask, which is so funny because that's what I thought the shape of it looked like. So maybe this was a DIY, I don't know. The last item I want to show is a candle jar, and this is something that you can find around your home. And I just wanted to show that you can just find things that you already have and upcycle them and turn them into something new. Now that you see a little bit of what we're working with, let's go ahead and transform them. Hello from voiceover Tina. For this first upcycle, we're starting with an empty candle jar, and if you have one lying around, you can just melt down the wax and clean it up to upcycle it. One of the easiest and quickest ways to upcycle ceramic and glassware is to spray paint them. So for this project, I'm using a terracotta spray paint by Rust-Oleum, and it's quickly becoming one of my faves. I brought the jar outside, and I'm giving it one nice even coat. And even after just one coat, the spray paint gives it such nice coverage, but of course I gave it another coat about after an hour of dry time. The great thing about spray paint is that you get a smooth finish on your pieces and it takes minimal effort, so it's one of my favorite DIY hacks ever. After that dries, you can totally leave it like this and call it a day, but I'm going to level it up even more with one of my favorite upcycling techniques with some good old baking soda paint. You can add in as much as you want depending on how thick you want your paint to be, but a good rule of thumb is to mix in a 3 to 1 ratio of baking soda to paint. And for this piece, you'll see that I'm just using acrylic paint to create this light mustardy yellow color. The third technique that we're going to do on this project is to add a design, and I usually stick with organic or graphic designs that are really easy to freehand. Now I'm marking off my jar to create some vertical lines, and this doesn't have to be perfect, but I'm using my ruler and I try to section this out as evenly as possible. Now with my baking soda paint, I'm going to paint in the lines straight up and down right where we marked those off, and I'm going to create a backwards V shape to create two semicircles on top of each other. After that's all mapped out, I'm just going to fill it in and smooth it all out. So I'm just repeating this pattern around the entire jar, and keep in mind that these half circles definitely do not need to be identical, I like that there are subtle differences between each one and it gives it a beautiful handmade look. One of the best ways to really transform your pieces is to take that extra step by putting in your own personal touch with some fun designs to fit within your decor style. This design is inspired by a pattern that I've seen floating around on Pinterest and Instagram, and I haven't been able to find it in stores or to shop it online, so the next best thing was to DIY it, and I'm pretty happy that I went this route because it's a super simple design and adds in so much color. Depending on your paint mixture, you can totally add on another coat, and this will just give you more coverage and also adds in some more texture and thickness. For each one of these projects, I will be sealing them with some clear matte spray paint, and this totally just finishes it off. Alright guys, and check out this before and after. We transformed this plain old clear candle jar into a piece that's super stylish with just two fun and easy paint techniques. I love the texture contrast between the flat spray paint and the rough baking soda paint, and you can use this container to create another candle or turn it into a planter. There are just so many things that you can use this for, and I absolutely love that I was able to DIY a piece that I was eyeing online for just a fraction of the price. I hope you guys are enjoying the transformation so far. Before we jump into the next transformation, I wanted to show you guys what I'm learning on Skillshare this month. I cannot believe we're already into February and I've been learning so much this year so far, so let me show you guys what I've been up to. If you're not already familiar with Skillshare, it is an online learning community filled with thousands of classes for creatives and learners at any skill level. This month on Skillshare, I loved browsing through their Creative Start for 2021 list and finding classes to kick off this year. Currently, I'm taking a class with Andy J. Pizza called Find Your Style, 5 Exercises to Unlock Your Creative Identity, and I took a class with him previously and this one was just as awesome. Skillshare truly offers a wide variety of classes and really curates them for learning. I love that they are constantly updating their library with new classes, so you're always learning something new every single month. Premium Membership is less than $10 a month with an annual subscription, but if you click on the link in my description box, the first 1,000 people will get a free trial of Premium Membership to explore all of their classes. If you guys are interested in trying out Skillshare for yourself, definitely click on the link down below for a free trial of their Premium Membership. Alright guys, let's move on to the next transformation. For the next technique, I've sanded down this vase and I'm going to add some texture to it. There are a number of ways to add texture to a piece, but for this one, I'm using some caulking that I picked up from Dollar Tree. You could also use spackle or joint compound, but I'm just using what I have at home. So I'm basically just spreading this onto the vase with my hands and I'm trying to create little groups and textures into the vase. You'll actually see here that I put on too much, so I'm taking a bit off, but there really is no wrong way to do this. You can spread it horizontally or vertically or even in circular motions to create different looks. After letting that dry, I'm using some baking soda paint and this time I created a light brown color and I'm going to give it two coats for an even coverage. You could stop here and leave it as is, but of course I wanted to show you more techniques to add even more texture, so I'm using some cinnamon for this part and I'm just going to spray the vase with some water and then rub the cinnamon all around the vase. This is a really great technique to give your piece an aged look and you can use other ingredients found in your kitchen, such as nutmeg or coffee, or you can even go outside and use some dirt to create some mud. Each one of these items is going to give you a different look, but it really does create so much depth and I found that the more water that I added to an area, the darker the color is, so you can definitely play around with this to make it your own. After letting that dry, I added a clear coat just to ensure that the cinnamon will stay on the vase and it was ready to go. This piece is giving me less chemistry flask vibes and more aged ceramic vase vibes and this would look so pretty with some dry florals or even a propagating plant in there. I had so much fun creating this faux ceramic texture and I love the end result of it. For this last piece, we're going to change the shape of the vase by adding handles to it. First, I'm rolling out a piece of oven-baked polymer clay and I'm using the popsicle stick trick here to make it as even as possible with four sticks on each side. Then I'm cutting out a circle shape with a can and removing the excess clay. And before cutting it in half, I actually let the clay sit out a little bit just so that it hardens up and this just makes it a little bit easier to cut and I'm just making semi-circle shapes by cutting it in half. Then I'm smoothing out the edges a bit with my hands and now we have our little handles. You'll see that I'm fitting them onto the vase just to see how big we want them. I'm just cutting off a little bit of the bottom to create a thinner half-circle shape. Once I was happy with that, I started to pinch the edges of the curved part of the circle just to get rid of that thick, sharp edge. And I'm really trying to make it super smooth but this doesn't have to be perfect since we'll be sanding it down later. To make them a little easier to handle, no pun intended, I popped them into the fridge for about 10 minutes just to harden a bit again. And while we wait for those to harden, I'm just going to sand my vase to prep it for the handles and painting later. Now that my handles are a little hardened, I'm going to score the bottoms of them with an exacto knife and I'm creating these little hatch marks which I'm not actually sure if this is necessary when working with polymer clay but honestly, you can never be too cautious. Then I'm adding some Bake and Bond by Sculpey which is an adhesive that cures with baking and I'm putting it onto the vase exactly where I want it to be. And for extra good measure, I smoothed some of the clay out onto the glass and I tried to make it as seamless as possible. Then I'm popping that into the oven according to the directions at 275 degrees for 30 minutes and I'm doing this one at a time just to make sure that nothing moves while baking. So you'll see that the vase is sitting on its side on top of a bowl which is a really good hack to try out. After one of the handles was complete, I just repeated that onto the other side. I also wanted to mention another alternative which is to bake the handles first and then glue them on afterwards. You can use something like E6000 glue but the handles might not fit perfectly so you might need to use something like spackle or caulking to fit in the gaps. And for this technique, you really can create any type of handle that you'd like. Depending on the vase piece, you really can create a one of a kind vase and for this one, I got inspo from photos that I've seen on Pinterest and I really love the look of it. I think it's super unique and looks a little bit different than your typical rounded arms which I think still would've looked beautiful on this piece but it's just so fun to try out different styles to see what you'd like. Alright now that we have the handles on there, I'm just going to sand them down a bit with some fine grit sandpaper and this is really going to smooth everything out but feel free to skip this part because it's totally optional. And now to transform this glass piece into a ceramic looking vase, I'm using some more baking soda paint for this. This time, I'm going to create an off-white color and I think this is going to make it look so chic. The trickiest part about adding on handles is to blend them together so the paint is really going to help you make it look like one seamless piece so I really took my time in those areas. And for now, I want to keep it one solid color but I can always go ahead and use some of the other techniques to give it an aged look or even add on speckles for more texture. This just serves as a perfect base and you can use any of the other techniques we covered to create the vibe you're going for. Adding on those two simple handles completely changed the shape of this vase and I think it looks so much more expensive and also changing it from glass to ceramic just really changed the whole vibe and I absolutely love how this came out. And here's a look back at some of the pieces I've created over the past year with these techniques. I really hope that you guys learned something new to incorporate into your future projects and I can't wait to see what one-of-a-kind pieces you create for your home using some of these techniques. So those are some of my top transformation techniques. I really love how each one of those turned out. Let me know in the comments if you guys have tried any of these techniques out and if you haven't yet, which one would you like to do next? I would love to hear your thoughts. Don't forget to check out Skillshare and get a free trial of their Premium Membership. I want to thank them so much for being a supporter of this channel and if you guys want to check them out, click on the link down below. If you guys like this video, make sure that you give it a big thumbs up and subscribe down below for new videos every single week. If you guys recreate any of the projects from today's video, make sure that you tag me on Instagram. I'm also posting on there every single day. Oh my god, I feel like I talk so much. But that is it for today's video. Thank you guys all so much for watching. Stay inspired and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!