Thrifty bedroom extras...

For the majority of people these are far from exciting, but for me, these are the best thing since sliced bread. 

I hate throwing things away, especially if I can see another use for them. And I'm always looking for cute extras to put in my room, ideally that cost as little as I physically possible. So this sort of became a winning formula.

Take my little cute vintage styled bottle 'vase'. Yep it's just a Fentimans bottle that I saved. But how cute are those bottles? 

I've had those fabric flowers for what seems like forever, they only cost a couple of pounds in the first place, but they were looking a bit sorry for themselves in a spare mug that I had lying around. They just needed something to make them more of a feature.

Cue the bottle. Now they actually make a really nice little display on my desk. And alls it took was to save my bottle from lunch one day. This would look good in any sort of bottle, you could use a wine bottle or maybe you're lucky enough to have one of the retro looking coca-cola bottles. 

The second two, housing my cotton buds and cotton pads are actually old candles. I love jars and things like that to use as storage but I desperately don't want to pay nearly £10 for a jar just to keep cotton wool in. 

So instead, this is just an old Yankee candle. When I had completely finished the candle inside, I just melted the wax that was left, removed it, gave the jar a clean inside with some washing up liquid and then it was ready to house my cotton pads. I just did the exact same with the square shaped glass and ta da I had two new containers.

Removing wax from a glass jar. This part can be a little tricky so I thought I'd tell you what I did. It's really simple, you just have to be patient and careful.

You're going to need a bucket or washing up bowl and some hot water. Alls you simply need to do is float the candle jar in the hot water to melt the wax inside, and then you can pull (or tip) the wax out. 

Here's the part that you need to be careful with. Glass does not like heat. So don't just pour boiling hot water around the glass because it's likely to smash or crack. Instead it can be worth floating the jar in lukewarm water first and then gradually (and I mean gradually) adding hot water. That way the temperature of the water increases really slowly, therefore you are much less likely to break the glass. 

If you're trying this, pretty please be careful. Below is what my jar looked like, once you've got the water hot enough to start to melt the wax then it's just a case of waiting. 

Happy reusing!