Decorating Ideas for Glass Gallon Jugs

Window Suncatchers

• Decorate a sunny windowsill and infuse a little color into the room with your large glass jugs. Fill some gallon jugs two-thirds of the way up with glass pebbles and line them up across the sill. Glass pebbles are translucent so they catch the light streaming through the windows beautifully. Bright colors like red and yellow can add warmth and cheerfulness to the room, while cool colors like subtle blues and green can help create a calm, subdued atmosphere.

Holiday Serving Bottle

• Convert glass gallon jugs into serving bottles for holidays. Use stencils and glass etching medium to create frosted seasonal designs on the outside of the jug. For a Thanksgiving jug, etch leaves around it and fill it with your mulled wines or spiced cider. Etch a Christmas jug with snowflakes, trees or stars and serve eggnog in it. Make a bloody-looking cranberry juice punch for Halloween and serve it in a scull-etched jug or etch flowers on a jug for Mother's Day and fill it with iced tea to serve at brunch.

Make a Jug Lamp

• A craft store lamp kit and a shade can help you convert your leftover jugs into attractive table lamps for any room of the house. Give them a little more style by decoupaging the glass. Cut out strips of tissue paper or old shelf paper and glue it to the glass with a transparent sealer glue. Alternately, glue objects like seashells, marbles or bottle caps to the outside of the jug to give the lamp the style you want. You can also fill the lamp instead with small particles, such as glass beads or layers of colored sand.

Table Centerpiece

• Gallon-sized glass jugs are the right height for a table centerpiece. One option is to fill them with water tinted with food coloring and put one to three tall flowers in the vase, such as sunflowers in blue-tinted water or long-stemmed roses in pink-tinted water. If you prefer candles, get some candles in assorted colors. Choose a candle that fits in the mouth of the jug, or a slightly larger size so you can shave the bottom edges with a butter knife until it fits into the jug. Place the jug on a vintage tray from a thrift shop to catch drippings and burn one candle after another in the mouth of the jug. Let the wax drippings build up over time. The colors of dripping wax decorate the outside of the jug, mixing and blending together.