Summer Sunset Votive Holder

I haven’t been blogging for a full year yet, but this post is kind of a milestone. It’s my 50^th. Perhaps a celebratory cake recipe might have been appropriate, but since the season of outdoor living finally seems to be here, I decided to showcase this votive holder instead. In my opinion, you can’t really enjoy an evening outdoors without plenty of candlelight.

This particular project is a 4.5 inch square glass container. If my memory is correct, I got it a few years ago for Mother’s day. I believe it contained an orchid. Alas, the orchid died a short time later. A couple of months ago I found the container when I was organizing my new plant shelf. Putting square mosaic tiles on it seemed like an obvious choice, especially if I could find iridescent or dichroic glass.

The tiles I chose are approximately .75 - 1 inch square. There are two different colors that were alternated. One is a coated dark glass, and the other is buff. While mosaic grout would have been appropriate and easier to use on flat surfaces, I used copper metallic Gallery Glass paint between the tiles, after the silicone sealer cured. It was easy to paint between the tiles with the bottle’s narrow tip. An added bonus? No special tools or cleanup afterward was required, plus the paint dries faster. To get good coverage with grout, it has to be spread over the tiles with a grouting tool then wiped off. Since the iridescent coloring of my tiles was a coating, rather than being fused into the glass, I didn’t want to risk damaging them.

This project was completed over a couple of days. It took 15 – 20 minutes at a time to glue the tiles to a side, and no more than 5 minutes to paint between then. Each side was allowed to dry before another one was done. This is probably obvious, but you will want your work surface to be horizontally flat. The container is laid on its sides to apply the tiles and paint.

A note about candles: While I do enjoy candlelight, and fire is supposedly man’s greatest discovery, I’m actually quite fond of battery-operated LED “candles”. You can get them in several different sizes now, and some even come with wax exteriors. Many flicker like candle flames. They are also much safer. If you forget to turn them off, the battery may die, but they won’t start a fire. My favorite application for them is putting them in containers with semi-transparent surfaces. Then you can’t tell the candles are fake. And since LEDs don’t generate heat, you’re not very likely to get burned if you need to touch the container.

The Project Queen