I love the idea of mixing mason jars and milk bud vases with flowers as center pieces for the wedding reception—similar to the picture below. Since our reception venue has wood floors and beams and exposed brick walls, I think this type of decor would fit nicely with the space.
I haven’t started looking extremely hard for these since the wedding is still over a year away, but I’m still keeping my eye out for the vases. I have found some on eBay, or wedding websites that sell used wedding decor but the sellers are either A) asking too much for them [in my opinion], B) won’t ship the vases, or C) the shipping charges are more than what it’s worth. So while I would love to have real, legit milk glass vases, I do have a back up plan: fake them.
I found this tutorial on Ruffled Blog, so I decided to try it out myself. I happened to find two glass bud vases that have the exact pattern that you would find on a real milk glass vase. They were about $1 each at a local goodwill, so I snatched them up to try the spray painting idea. I washed the vases and then took them outside to spray paint.
Before:
I normally use Rustoleum branded spray paint, but I wasn’t able to find a white glossy paint, so I went with Krylon. This spray paint is only semi-gloss, but I would recommend going with a full/high gloss spray paint to get that milk glass look.
After:
I think they make a pretty good faux milk glass bud vase. With a full/high gloss spray paint I think they would look even more believable. So now that I know these could make do for one evening of festivities, I would be okay with the faux vases. But I still want the real things, and would probably keep them if I had the real deal. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed with the hunting.
—m.