Give Plain Glass Jars A Cute Woven Basket Look With A Budget-Friendly DIY

Jars of jelly, salsa, or spaghetti sauce with durable metal lids deserve to have a life beyond their food-holding origins. The inventive crafter from the YouTube channel DIY Home Decor came up with a new way to dress up one of the most easy-to-reuse items that we find in our recycling bins. This clever way to reuse old glass jars leaves you with something attractive and practical at the same time. A woven covering on a medium-sized jar is nothing more than hair ties, skewers, and yarn. Use it to store small items as a simple home accent or display it without its lid as a repurposed flower vase.

What you'll need for this project is a clean glass jar with a lid, a pack of bamboo cooking skewers that are longer than your jar is tall, a pack of hair ties like these J-MEE Seamless Hair Bands, and one or two colors of yarn that complement the colors of the hair ties you'll be using. Also, have on hand a glue gun and a pair of snippers capable of cutting through bamboo skewers. For a look that's more typical of a rustic basket, opt for natural tones like white, tan, brown, or black for your hair ties. However, you can spice up your basket with rainbow-colored or patterned hair ties as well.

Start by sliding hair bands around the jar's circumference. If you want one uniform look for your jar, you can cover the entirety of the jar sides with hair ties. For a two-tone effect, only place hair ties halfway up the jar and cover the top half with woven yarn. You can use just one color of hair ties, alternate two colors, or try a pattern like three rows of a light color interspersed with one row of a contrasting color. The bamboo skewers are the vertical component of the weave; use them as-is for a buff-colored accent, infuse them with coffee to naturally stain the wood, or paint them in another color that plays well with your choice of hair bands.

Don't trim the sticks to jar height yet since the pointed ends can help make the weaving process smoother. Slip one skewer vertically over and under alternating bands from the jar's lip to its base. It will hold this pattern in place and create openings between the jar and the band. Take advantage of this assist by sliding in another skewer next to the first one, then moving it around the jar and closer to the other side of the first piece. Leave 1 inch between all of them. Repeat this until you have skewers all the way around the jar. Between each stick, slide more skewers that go over and under the opposite hair ties to the ones that are already placed. Repeat this process, moving the sticks closer together as you go.

To complete the upper half of the jar with woven yarn, tuck and glue the cut end of the yarn under the highest hair tie. Weave the yarn over and under the exposed skewers, making sure your first row is woven around opposite skewers as the hair band row next to it. Trim excess length from the skewers when you're done.

Conceal the lid under a yarn coil. Glue the yarn's end to the lid's lip and encircle the rim with yarn, gluing as you go. Continue this circular wrapping and gluing so that you end up with a spiral of yarn that ends in the top center of the lid. If you're using more than one color of yarn, change out hues as you glue your coils. Wrap and glue yarn around the base of the jar to cover the cut ends of the skewers.

This woven look is cute enough on its own, but you can easily add decoration to give it some personal pizazz. With some paper and glue, snip up a fanciful butterfly to grace your jar. You can also use trinkets around your house by repurposing cabinet pulls or old jewelry. Glue them to the top of your lid for a makeshift handle or along the sides as an accessory. That's all it takes to turn an old spaghetti sauce jar into a cute woven basket-style decor.