Here's what happened:
While surfing the web for some inspirational images for things that might prompt some Summer-time toddler imagination, I found a project on a Thai-mummy-blog called 'jellyfish in a bottle'. The result looked fabulous, and the tutorial images looked straight forward enough, so I scanned through the pictures, and became so excited, I checked my clock, decided I had enough time to knock up a couple of bottled lovelies before I had to pick up my daughters from their play date. I turned off my computer, raced to the kitchen and commenced to make my craft.
I'm a fairly humble person generally, but left me now grovel and scrape and say the biggest apology to the authoress of the original blog post - "I was arrogant and rude; I am so sorry that I did not take the time to do your blog post the courtesy it deserved; I have no doubt it is a simple exercise, if you read your tutorial before attempting this craft."
I didn't put air in the belly of my jellyfish, so it didn't really float. I overfilled the belly before putting it in the bottle, and was swearing and cursing as I tried to figure out how to push the swollen water belly through the small bottle's neck-hole. I put way too much blue-food colouring in to the water bottle so I couldn't even see the first jelly fish I made. The tentacles I made were thick and wide, and extremely ugly, but hey, this was just a trial run anyway. The string I used was dark blue, because again, I was in a hurry by now, I could use something 'invisible' later, I just wanted to confirm this craft project would work... And the embarrassing list goes on as I tried to convince myself it was all going to be ok...
If all that's not bad enough, I decided to have another go. No. I did not pack it away, wait until later, turn the computer on for some more research and try again tomorrow. Oh no. I just went ahead and made another one. It was slightly better, but not much. The photo should give you an idea; it's less a jellyfish in a bottle, and more like, well I can't really say... plenty of things come to mind about messages in bottles, but it's all rather yukky... like my craft fail.
I did go back to the blog post and read it more carefully, and she did use the phrase "With some trials and errors, my little jellyfish comes alive" so it's not as simple as it seems - if you're having a go, don't despair - but DO read the instructions more carefully than I did... I'm sure the results will be worth it!
PS - here's how I salvaged my failure: I carefully pulled the ridiculous wanna-be-jellyfish out of the bottle, topped it up with some more water and threw in some sparkly love heart 'confetti' as well as some big silver beads, when the bottle was turned up and down, the contents shifted, I photographed what was inside, and the photographs of hearts and beads in the pale blue bubbly 'ocean' will be used to make a "I love Summer" card to go with some Monsta Surf printpaper.