We went out for a special summer dinner a few weeks back at a sweet little restaurant on Shelter Island called The Vine Street Cafe. While we've blogged them before, this time we found a new idea: using thick outdoor lamp glass covers combined with sand to hold candles. These are the things that screw up into front door lamp fixtures.
Strong and durable, the glass is hardware store inexpensive, the right height and allows the glow of the candle to shift and glow through the density and ripples of the glass.
It's casual. It's beachy. It's DIY. How nice and easy would this be up on a Manhattan rooftop or on the beach?
Veronica & Keith's Handmade Chic 
The World's Ugliest Condo: The Big Bathroom Reveal 
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Hunslet Dinner Plate
A Beginner's Guide to Superb Stir-Fry: Quick, Healthy Meals from a Wok
Homesteaders' Cocktail Recipe: Lovage Simple Syrup
Comments (4)
Cheap, cute and BRILLIANT! I have 2 in my storage shed that I took down when I moved into my townhouse and I almost threw them out last week during one of my de-cluttering binges. Thanks for the great idea!
They're called "jelly jar" or "jelly glass" fixtures.
this is such a great little restaurant (i visited it on my last trip out there) and i love this idea!
Do you happen to have a stockpile of those "what do we do with it" vases that came with the delivered flowers? For the past few years I've been selectively choosing and then filling them with sand or small gravel, with a tall candle stuck inside (I advise dripless) and then placing them anywhere and everywhere out in the yard/patio at night.
I actually make a point of looking for these in thrift stores now. You become an "expert" on the variety of patterns in the glass, which can be quite fun and beautiful. I also like to find one color besides clear - green is the most available - and group those together.
Because they are so cheap, you can put plenty of them out there in the yard. But it can be one hell of an insect graveyard in the morning.