Flower Lights Out of Recycled Plastic

I love to recycle things into art projects! And recycling plastic drinking bottles couldn’t be more fun. With this tutorial, you’ll learn how to make beautiful, colorful flowers that are strung on a string of lights. It adds glowing color to wherever you hang them. Materials needed are recycled, plastic water bottles, paint or coloring medium, a heat gun, and a string of lights. A drill is also handy to create a hole in the center for the lights.

• Plastic water bottles
• Acrylic paints
• Rubbing alcohol for the airbrush gun
• Airbrush gun (I think you could figure out another way to paint these if you don't have an airbrush)
• Heat gun or hairdryer
• Drill or Dremmel
• Glue and glue gun
• A string of holiday lights

Grab a bunch of plastic water bottles. You'll need as many as the lights on your string.

Cut the bottoms of the bottles and cut and shape them to look like petals. Also, punch a hole through the middle big enough to stick the little light bulb through.

With the remainder of the bottle, cut out some leaf shapes.

Get out your airbrush or whatever you choose to color your flowers and go at it. Using a couple of colors on each flower makes it more colorful.

Do the same with the leaves.

After the flowers and leafs dry, take your heat gun..- a blow dryer works just as well - And carefully heat the plastic.

Just a little heat will give them a lot of shape - too much and they curl more than you want them to.

Insert the bulb of the string of lights through the back of the flower.

You want just the bulb to be showing through the front.

Use a glue gun and glue around the back of the bulb to secure it to the flower.

Make sure you glue it on the back of the flower so the front looks prettier.

And for another colorful, glassy-like project you can hang in your home, check out my Faux Stained Glass post.

I also have lots more colorful crafts on my website.