Step 1: Make a simple stencil for your pattern. My gold cross is 1/2" long and wide, giving me a total design area of 1 1/2" x 1 1/2"
Step 2: Lay you stencil on the jar and trace using a fine point sharpie, gel pen or china pencil.
Step 3: Repeat until you have the desired amount of designs drawn on to the jar. It's worth keeping in mind that the more designs you have, the more time you'll need to finish the project. If patience isn't your thing, you may want to go with a less-is-more approach or simply enlarge your stencil a bit.
Step 4: Now that your designs are drawn onto the jar you will need to block off the area around your design with masking tape. Lay the tape around the sides of your designs, just outside of the tracing.
**(It makes it go a little quicker to cut your tape into a number of small pieces in advance so you can just grab them as you go.)Step 5: When you've finished take a moment to firmly press down all of the pieces of tape.
Step 1: Paint inside all of the design areas with your jar of adhesive. Let dry until tacky.
Step 2: Get out a sheet of gold leaf and lay across as many of the designs as you can. You'll continue adding sheets until all design areas are covered. The gold leaf is pretty forgiving so if there are any edges or crevices left uncovered, just add a little bit to those areas.
Step 3: Rub over all of the gold leaf areas firmly, but gently with a soft cloth.
Step 4: Moment of truth... remove the tape! If you find any extra bits stuck in places where they shouldn't be, just remove them.
**(Also, be sure to save all of those extra pieces of leafing that came off when the tape.
You can use those on your next project!)**The beautiful results are great to use as a vase, or you could add a bit of sand or rice to lay a votive onto. Hope you'll have just as much fun with this as I did!