Advent Candles in Bottles: Vintage Charm Anyone Can Make

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Advent candles in bottles with vintage enamel-look number tags. An easy DIY Advent decoration that uses common materials and looks good until Christmas.

Sometimes the best project is not the one you planned. But the one that exists entirely because I ruined the first one.

I had this beautiful idea in my head for this year’s Advent decoration. I started making it, taking a thousand how-to pictures along the way, fully counting on giving you an awesome tutorial. And it was turning out so cool, exactly as planned. Then came the final step, curing the project in the oven. So I did.

And then I went on to do other stuff, and I forgot about the oven.

And I burned my project.

Beyond possible repair.

So plan B it was. When I was in town looking for replacement supplies, I stumbled across a set of wide-mouth milk bottles. Not the prettiest bottle, but good base material. Plan B: cheat a little and prettify a ready-bought bottle.

And honestly? Plan B turned out cuter than plan A would have been. Come on, let’s take a peek.

How to Make Advent Candles in Bottles

(photos where they are now, one per beat — keep your before/after bottle pair, it does real work)

These are the steps I took to come from the before bottle on the left to the after bottle on the right.

Paint the cork of the original bottle white. It is one brush stroke and it changes the whole bottle from “store shelf” to “styled.”

Add washi tape to the tea light holder. One strip of pattern does the same job as a ribbon, and it takes seconds.

Make small paper tags with numbers to hang where the pine cones used to be.

That is the whole transformation. Three steps, and a plain bottle becomes an Advent candle that looks like it came from a flea market instead of a discount store.

How to Make the Numbered Advent Tags

This is the part that makes people lean in.

Add a line of glitter glue to some extra small packaging tags. Punch a circle out of white cardboard, and paint the edge black with a Sharpie. The numbers are old scratch-off numbers, added in the center.

From a distance, these paper tags look just like vintage enamel tags. They are not. They are paper, glue, and a little trickery, and nobody has ever spotted the difference from across the table.

(PS I have faked vintage enamel tags before. You can see them and learn how I made them in my Advent table decoration.)

And then all I had to do was style the vignette.

Where to Get The Materials I Used (or Replacements)

If you want to make something similar, I suggest using wide-mouth bottles (like these vintage juice bottles) and looking for tea light holders/tea light picks in the floral arranging department. Those are the little tea light holders with a pick underneath, usually used in wreaths. You could bend a little hook on that pick and dangle your little ornament/tag/number from it.

The tags are just simple cardstock labels. If you don’t have any you can use a label punch to make them, and a circular punch for the number tags. The rest is just a number stickers, a sharpie outline and some glitter glue. Or skip making the numbered tags altogether and buy them ready-made. These look like quite a lot like authentic vintage enameled number tags.

For decorating I used white little pom poms, mini silver and white ornaments, and some pretty dangles.

That little first tea light was burning all day yesterday (well, I had to replace it from time to time, of course), celebrating the first Advent.

Happy Advent to you all! The season has officially started.

This is the first time I started decorating for the Holiday season with an Advent piece. Here are some of the previous ones: my hanging rustic Advent wreath, my last-minute Advent vignette, and my DIY Advent centerpiece with enamel-look tags.

my hanging rustic Advent wreath, my last-minute Advent vignette, and my DIY Advent centerpiece with enamel-look tags. And if you want more easy and fun DIY Advent decorations, my whole collection is one click away.

Your Turn

So tell me, have you ever burned a project beyond repair and had to improvise? I feel like the best decorations in my house all started as plan B. I would love to hear about yours in the comments.

Pin this one for the Sunday you need an Advent decoration that answers its own questions. Future you, lighter in hand, will be grateful.

Thank you for sharing my content!