Elevate Your Basic Glass Jar Into A Work Of Art With Twine And An Easy DIY

We're big fans of clever ways to reuse glass jars around the house. Mason jars have a classic look that hardly needs embellishment. Ones that once held pickles, salsa, or pasta sauce are not as naturally cute, but they make great blank slates for upcycling projects. With a roll of jute twine, convert your former food holder into a rustic, textural container to hold propagations, a candle, a bouquet of wildflowers, battery-operated twinkle lights, or anything else you need it for. A thickly wrapped collar of jute around the mouth of the jar holds lengths of twine in place. Tie them together at lengths over the surface of the jar, and you have a pattern reminiscent of chicken wire. Alternatively, you can arrange the jute pieces in a lattice form.

To make this versatile vessel from an old glass jar, gather up a large jar with or without a lid, a roll of twine, a glue gun, scissors, a permanent marker, a measuring tape, and a piece of corrugated cardboard or boxboard. For a different flair, swap the jute for something like this KNITSILK Recycled Sari Silk Yarn or baker's twine in an appealing color. You could even use strips of ribbon if you take care to lay them flat on the jar's surface as you work. If your jar still has a usable lid, forgo the collar around the jar's opening and zhuzh up the lid for a closable container for stylish air-tight storage.

Start by taking off any labels left on your jar. If you have Clorox wipes on hand, use them to remove sticker residue from the glass. Cut 16 pieces of twine to glue in pairs at even spaces around the lip of the jar; make them between 1½ and 2 times as long as the jar's height so you'll have excess. Pair them up and glue them to the lip of the jar so that the excess hangs down. Repeat by gluing the remaining pairs at even spaces around the jar's lip.

From two neighboring pairs of twine pieces, take the two strips that are closest to each other and tie them together about 1 inch from the lip. Glue the knot to the jar. Repeat with the rest of the pairs. For the next row, tie neighboring strings from different knotted pairs together, gluing as you go. Continue knotting and gluing for each row until you've reached the base of the jar. Glue the ends of the twine to the base, and trim excess.

Measure both the circumference of the jar's lip and its height. Measure and cut a piece of cardboard with these dimensions. Glue the end of your jute roll to one end of the cardboard, and wrap the cord around its width until you've covered the entire piece. Glue the wrapped piece around the mouth of the jar. 

With mostly the same materials, you can snip and glue together a version with a lattice pattern. Cut enough pieces of twine to be glued at spaces about ¼ to ½-inch apart around the lip of the jar. Make them two or three inches longer than the height of the jar. Glue one strand at a diagonal angle to the base of the jar. Following the same angle, glue alternating strands to the base in rows.

Once you've completed this first half of the lattice, overlay the remaining strands in the other direction. Mimic the angle and spacing you used for the first half of the latticing. Create a jute-cardboard piece like the one from the first DIY to glue around the jar's mouth. 

For a lidded take on either project, skip the collar. Don't attach the twine on any of the threads of the jar's mouth. Give the cut ends a bit of polish by gluing and wrapping just one or two rotations of twine over top of them. Glue the end of some twine to the edge of the lid, and coil it around the vertical lip, gluing as you go. Once you get to the top of the lid, continue the coiling and gluing until you get to the center of the lid. Trim the excess twine. When you're done, throw the twine trimmings in your compost pile! They make a great part of a brown ingredient, as long as the twine is made of 100% natural fibers.