I've had seashells decorating my bathroom for a while. They had always looked messy; the colour's weren't uniform and they got really dusty lying in the open dish that they were displayed in. I saw this post on pinterest which suggested spray-painting sea shells chrome and using them as a décor item.
I decided to display them in jars and bottles of different heights. I had one pretty clear glass jar and I dug out a cordial bottle and a jam jar out of the recycling pile. After putting these through a cycle in the dishwasher I still needed to remove the labels and annoying sticky label residue. To do this I used the useful trick that I used in this post. It's really simple, I mixed equal parts of cooking oil and baking soda applied this mixture to the jar and left it for 30 minutes. Then, after a quick rinse the jars were clean and ready for use.
Spray painting the shells should have been really easy. I cleaned them and laid them on newspaper ready to paint. However, I had decided to buy silver spray paint instead of chrome spray paint. This was a mistake, The silver spray paint looked grey, industrial and dull. I went back to the hardware store and bought chrome. The shells now started looking really good. I thoroughly sprayed one side of a batch of shells, waited for it to dry. Then sprayed the other side.
Now I just had to place the shells in the jars and bottle. Filling up the bottle was time consuming and tricky as only very small shells could fit down the neck. If you decide to use a bottle to display your shells either make sure that you have a lot of small shells that will fit down the neck of the bottle or (and this my preferred suggestion) get one with a wider neck. The jars were simple though.
I like the cleaner, neater look.
Before:
After:
Enjoy!
