TikTok's Clever Use For Spare Glass Pieces Is Stunning

Thrift stores, flea markets, and estate sales are often filled with beautiful glassware pieces, encompassing everything from home décor and lighting fixtures to antique and vintage dishware. While many of these pieces are whole and ready to use, some are mismatched or missing certain parts. They can, however, still be gorgeous and useful items to add to your home even without every piece in place. Looking for cute ideas of what to do with a baseless hurricane lantern or a pretty lid to a missing candy dish? By using these odd and mismatched pieces as a way to highlight candles and lighting elements, you can give them many more years of use.

These pieces, especially vintage ones, can often be quite beautiful additions to your dishware collection and décor. Popular varieties include ordinary clear leaded glass, colorful Depression glass, or creamy white milk glass, all of which add a beautiful sense of texture and history wherever you use them. You may even have some laying around your home from pieces that have been lost or broken over the years. Since they are often incomplete, you can usually find them for a steal at second hand markets.

For a cool way to use hurricane lamp cylinders, place them over a pillar candle on a flat surface like a glass or metal coaster, saucer, or other flame-resistant platform. You immediately have a protected candle that is perfect for using when you don't want an open flame, like table centerpieces or homes with children or pets. It's also perfect to keep candle flames lit when enjoying outdoor entertaining, where the glass cover can shelter the candle from the wind. Look for tall hurricane glass columns or shorter squatter lantern toppers that fit over small tealights. You can also glue the lantern glass over an inexpensive taper candle holder. A collection of various-sized ones makes a beautiful dining room centerpiece or mantle décor.  

Other glassware bits can be easily repurposed to help decorate your home with candles, such as lids and bases to containers that have lost their top. Give a shallow bowl that once served the base of a candle's new life by placing a tea light or votive candle inside. Even industrial items like colorful electrical insulators can be placed over a flameless LED candle. While most pieces that were manufactured to hold candles are heat safe, if you plan to use them with an open flame, make sure to check that glass pieces are heat resistant and well-ventilated.

These distinctive old pieces have many uses beyond candles and lighting as well. Repurpose an old Depression glass juicer as a cute dish for holding jewelry by placing bracelets and bangles around the top and smaller items like rings in the bottom. Use an old cream and sugar set as a cute desktop organizer to keep pens, markers, and or paint brushes within easy reach. Or, use the bowl as an adorable container for a small plant. Larger bowls and bases can make great catch-all spots for keys and coins. They also look fabulous when filled with pinecones or ornaments on a coffee table for seasonal decor.

A pretty stopper or decorative lid can be used over other containers and jars for small storage, like to hold cotton balls or Q-tips on a bathroom counter. Old decorative perfume bottles, though they have long run out of perfume, can be great to add scented oil and reeds to make a pretty diffuser. Or, place a bottle on a saucer to catch ash and you have a perfect incense holder. You can even use decorative glass stoppers wired or glued to sticks as pretty garden stakes.