Potion Bottles

Every haunted house needs some Potion Bottles, right? So I've been working on Potion Bottles and strange ingredients that a witch might use. First I scoured the house for odd jars, bottles, and glass containers. Then I started gathering creepy ingredients. For some of them I just used weird seed pods or fruit from the garden. Like those things called Deadly Nightshade; they are merely fruit from my Pittosporum shrub. And below are some tiny figs from a tree out in the field.

For Wool of Bat I used some fake fur that Teen2 had lying around. I just snipped it into little chunks and suddenly I had bat fur.

This is an idea I found on the Internet. You take a little plastic skeleton, wrap some spider web stuff around it, bent it into an awful position, immerse it in colored water and make a disturbing label. Mine says: Shrinking Potion Trials, June 1867, Test Subject No. 013, Healthy Male 22 years, Survived 2 days, 14 hours. The idea came from this wonderfully creative person who just happens to have some other great ideas I'm going to use too.

Here are more strange things from the garden. I think these are quince, but I'm calling them Datura stramonium. I know, I know, actual Thorn Apples are spiky little seed pods, but I'm hoping no one else will know that.

Oh, and this one was fun. It's a little yogurt, some lemon curd and some chunks of strawberry jam with green food coloring. The red jam chunks make a nice surprise when you pick it up and inspect it.

And some of my potion bottles are nothing more than things from the frige re-labeled. These are capers, but suddenly they look a little like Eye of Newt, don't they? And below are dried cranberries, re-labeled as Zombie Scabs.

For the labels you can snag images off the Internet and rearrange them in Photoshop like I did, or you can use felt pens and write your own. But whatever you do, make sure you antique them like I showed you here. Have fun with this, but be careful! You're messing with magic you know!