Make a creepy, glowing light for your yard or a party

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#Do It Yourself#hacks#Halloween#lighting#mason jars#party

Halloween rocks, but it can be hard to find time to do anything around the house when you have limited time and money. Halloween Hacks are really simple ideas to make the season spookier for all.

Source: lilblueboo.com via Hannah on Pinterest
Source: lilblueboo.com via Hannah on Pinterest

This is such a brilliant idea. I’d love to have spooky lights in my yard for Halloween! I’m going to hide some in plants and trees to make things seem weird and ominous. These’d pair great with a fog machine, too.

The recipe for this glowing jar is:

  1. Find great jars
  2. Fill said jars with water
  3. Buy a batch of glow sticks, and carefully! mix a broken glowstick in each container and wham: spooky lights in the yard.

Here’s another easy way to create a glowing jar of awesome:

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I learned about this spooky glowing jar trick from the proprietors of Clockwork Couture…
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  1. Fill a jar with water.
  2. Take the guts of a highlighter out of the pen casing and pop it in the water.
  3. Let it sit overnight.
  4. Take out the highlighter guts and the water now glows with lit up with blacklight.

Perfect for your “mad scientist” set up. Or just moody lighting in general for your Halloween bash.

What awesome glowing jar hacks do you know of?

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Comments on Make a creepy, glowing light for your yard or a party

  1. We did this last year for a “Mad Scientist” party. The glowstick in the jar works pretty well but you definitely need to use the thick ones. The thin bracelet/necklace ones don’t have enough “juice.” Also, may I suggest alternate liquids, such as hair gel, and baby oil? The glow stick juice is pretty oily and tends to just sit in little balls on top of the water.

  2. I love this idea, and may try making a few! I will add one warning, though:

    I just recently learned that Glow Stick Goo is poisonous for cats. I can’t speak for dogs or children or anything else, just be careful when playing with the glowing goo, clean it up properly, etc.

    • I can’t speak to how long they’ll last in water, but it doesn’t last very long out of the plastic tube. I knew someone who broke one during a party (must have been dancing, cause there was bright yellow all over the floors and wall and himself), and we were worried it’d still be there a few hours later when the hotel crews came to clean up. Nope. Faded within the hour, and you couldn’t even tell it had been there. It surprised us cause they lasted nearly 24 hours in their packaging. Maybe just getting some extra and refreshing it every now and then will keep it bright?

    • I made these this year using dollar store glowsticks and they lasted about 48 hours. I put them out when it was dark the first night, they glowed brightly the first and second nights, and the third night they weren’t bright but they were definitely visible.

      I added vegetable oil (only oil I had) to one jar and it instantly killed the glowing. I added water to another, and it wasn’t nearly as glow-y as those without water.

      • mlorih,
        I am very curious to hear how you made them last for 48 hours. We are wanting to do this for our table centerpieces for prom and so far the best I’ve done is 1 1/2 hours. Help!!

        Thanks!

  5. Wow! I am going to try this to lead up to our front door since we don’t have a front light and turning on our full-blast porch light is rather un-atmospheric. Also great since I won’t have time to make a jack-o-lantern!

    • Update to a test run I did last night: It didn’t work in water, oil, anything. Boo. The glow faded in seconds. I finally filled a mason jar with a mix of skim milk and water and placed an intact glow stick in it. The milk obscured the glow stick and diffused the light and it looked pretty cool, albeit a bit different than the original idea! Lasted all night and was plenty bright!

  8. I don’t know why I never thought of this until now! Cool idea!

    I will say though, due to past mishaps with crappy glowsticks make sure you WASH YOUR HANDS THOROUGHLY after handling the glowy goo from glowsticks. And be careful about handling food (esp finger food), even after washing your hands. That goo tastes AWFUL ><

  10. I’m doing something similar this year. I used a frosting spray paint and painted the outside of the jars. I’m going to put the glowsticks inside and line our driveway with them.

  14. we just did 3 test runs. epic. fail. the only way we were able to create the effect seen in the pic was an empty jar, dump in the glowstick fluid, put the lid on, shake it up and enjoy the glow for about a minute. $6 of hack wasted. bummer…

    • This clearly needs more investigation — I’ve had good luck in the past. Certain brands must work better. I will report back with future findings! I’m sorry you had a sad hack 🙁

  15. Tried this last night but when we broke open the glow sticks, NOTHING came out. I could not get the liquid out of the sticks at all, so we ended up throwing a bunch of the intact glowsticks in jars of water and that had to be enough. Should have experimented ahead of time to get the effect we wanted, but I got home from work 15 minutes before trick-or-treat and still had to get in my costume. Better luck next year.

  17. I know this post has been around awhile but I just want to add- glow stick juice is some NASTY stuff! Two weekends ago I drunkenly tried to use my teeth to help me crack a bracelet to get it glowing and I got some of the stuff on my lips. I got a chemical burn all over my lips that lasted almost a week! So be careful!

  18. If you want a good long-lasting glow and you have access to a blacklight, fill your vessel of choice with tonic water. Tonic water glows vivid bright blue under blacklight. Just make sure that whatever variety of tonic water you use contains quinine. It’s the quinine that gives the bright blue glow. And yes, there are tonic waters that do not contain quinine and therefore will not glow.

    you can take your tonic water and freeze it into whatever shape you want with the use of ice cube trays or anything that you can remove icecubes from. You can even pour it into a latex glove, and have a glowing hand when you pull the glove off of the ice…

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