I Have Taken To The Bottle........At The Leaky Cauldron

After my little journey into all things shabby and chic I have returned to the cluttered and grungy world of Diagon Alley. The bar of The Leaky Cauldron needs all its bottles and crates filled and sorted ready to open its doors.

I have taken over the dining room table as my work room seems to be overflowing at the moment with all the pieces waiting to either go in the Cauldron or be finished off.

Here are a few of the necessary supplies for this messy and tricky operation: tacky wax for holding the bottles in place when filling, cocktail sticks for slow dripping, fine tipped syringes, a large glass tile for a work mat ( very easy to clean ), glass and creamic paints for tinting, and lots of tiny botttles and phials.

 These are a few that I have filled with Solid Water by Deluxe Materials. This is a resin product that you mix together to make a clear solution. The solution can be coloured with very small amounts of glass paint, oil paint and I even used tiny amounts of ceramic paint. It cannot be mixed with any water based paints. This product hardens off completely as long as you follow the mixing instructions. The more colour you add the darker the mixture. 

 I have been collecting bottles and decanters in all different shapes and sizes for a long time now intending to fill them with all different coloured wizarding liquids. I have now discovered that filling teeny, tiny bottles is not easy and in some cases totally impossible as the necks are just too thin. If I couldn't fill them, even with drips off a cocktail stick, I decided to simply paint them with glass paints. 

 I have filled the bar shelves with a mixture of shapes and sizes. Some of the bottles are the cheap acrylic types you can buy anywhere that I have simply re-labelled and dirtied up a little. 

 Some I have purchased at fairs and soaked off the labels and then added my own, Shepherd Miniatures have a really good glass range in a variety of shapes and colours.

I also printed off any witchy label I could find and stuck them to the back of the shelves and along the side to exaggerate the sense of clutter.

This was stage one of getting the bar together and today I had a full dress rehearsal......

I have lots of photos of all the different nooks and crannies to post tomorrow.