Make Anthropologie Inspired Seashell Bottles

This is Day 4 of Twleve Days of Gifts Kids Can Make!

I don’t know how kids feel about Anthropologie, but us adults sure seem to swoon over their artistic decor and design! Drool! These bottles are not hard to make – and certainly cost tons less than the $88 – $128 that similar seashell bottles are selling for on the Anthropologie website! They would look so pretty on a windowsill or decorating a bathroom counter. And with a shell, a little art clay, and a simple bottle, your kids can make a whole set of them to give to any beach loving friend or family member!

Anthropologie Inspired Shell Bottle Toppers Craft

Original craft inspriation from Anthropologie:

Anthropologie Shell Bottles

They have actually used metal to seemingly weld the shell to the top of the bottle. Since that’s a technique that’s a little out of reach for most of us, I’ve found it’s easy to recreate the look using polymer clay instead.

Seashell Bottles Craft Materials

You’ll need a glass bottle with a cork stopper. I got mine on Amazon and at Hobby Lobby.

A seashell

Black polymer clay like Fimo or Sculpey

E6000 glue or glue gun

How to Make Decorative Seashell Bottles

First, use a tiny screwdriver or other object to poke a small hole in the top of the cork. It only needs to be about 1/4″ to 1/2″ deep. This is going to partially stabilize the shell on the top of the cork while you work. So you may have to adjust the depth or width depending on your shell. This doesn’t need to be perfect and it can wobble a bit. The polymer clay will really end up holding it all in place.

Make a small hole in the cork bottle stopper

Now glue your shell into place on top:

Gluing the shell into the cork

Polymer clay needs to soften before you can use it. This would be a great thing for little hands to do! It’s kind of hard at first, but after a while it gets more mold-able. Start taking small pieces of the clay and pressing it around the base of the shell and cork. It really doesn’t need to be all that pretty, just do a lot of pressing on all sides to ensure the whole thing gets covered and is holding the shell tightly in place.

Adding polymer clay around shell and cork

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It’s kind of up to you if you want to cover the bottle opening (making it impossible to open later) or just covering up the cork to the bottle top. It also depends on your bottle style – you can see that I covered up one, but not the other. Since these are primarily just for decoration, it didn’t really matter to me. If you want to put something inside of the bottle (sand, more tiny shells, etc.), you can do that before you seal up the clay around the opening for good.

You could actually be done at this point if you want to. But I preferred a smoother texture on the finished bottle than I was able to get with pieced together clay. So I took another chunk of clay and flattened it out to a thin, small pancake shape. I was able to then wrap that around the clay to give it a smooth finish. It still looked pieced together on the back of course, but that doesn’t matter to me because I’ll just be displaying it on a wall shelf.

Smoothing out the polymer clay texture

Wrapping it around the cork:

Wrapping the Clay around the finished shell bottle stopper

And here’s a closeup of the two completed seashell bottles:

Closeup of Shell Bottle Toppers

Remember, this is Day 4 of Twleve Days of Gifts Kids Can Make! 4 down, 8 more to go!