How To Remove Sticker Residue Naturally

It's not always easy to remove sticker residue from glass, wood or plastic.

However, you can do it easily with something you probably already have in your pantry. It's quick, doesn't involve scrubbing or scraping and it's safe enough to eat.

Peanut butter has never been my favorite food.

As a kid, I tolerated it. As a teenager, I ate it in desperation. Sitting on the kitchen counter when my mom wasn't home, out of the jar, alternating it with spoonfuls of jelly.

However, as an adult, nothing about the taste or smell is even remotely enticing.

I have no interest in that brown paste anymore.

Unless, I'm using it to craft.

Then I'm all in.

But crafting, you say?

With peanut butter?

Why yes indeed, especially if I'm working on an upcycle or a thrifted DIY.

Peanut butter is oily and a tiny bit gritty and I think it's that combination that sinks into those nasty price labels that many second hand shops stick to everything and works them away.

Then I can get to the pretty part of the DIY quickly.

I can't tell you how many treasures I've brought home to upcycle over the years that required hours to remove all the paper and glue reside.

It's amazing to me that they still use stickers on items that can be so valuable.

I'd sit there with razors and wet sponges, vinegar, baking soda, olive oil and clear tape, wrestling. It was not fun.

The water took too much scrubbing, the vinegar smelled terrible and soaked into the wood, the baking soda left a white film behind that need to be cleaned off and the olive oil just didn't have any muscle on its own.

Then one day, my friend Ann shared her tip and everything changed.

Since then, peanut butter has become my go to sticky mess removal trick and it works like a charm.

Most recently, I shared how well it works on wood, when I needed to remove a sticker from a vintage tray. It took it off in a jiffy and there wasn't any damage to my valuable find.

Today, I'm going to show you how effortlessly it removes decorative stickers from glass.

This was a task I was not looking forward to tackling.

My great niece was christened many years ago and at each place setting were these darling little glass milk bottle favors filled with personalized M&M's.

At the end of the event, my sister told me to grab all the leftover ones, they were going to be tossed and she thought I might be able to use them for a craft.

So I did. I gave them a sweet makeover and I've used a few of them to decorate my Thanksgiving table over the years.

However, in order to get the labels off, I had to soak them in hot water for hours and then scrub. And scrub. And scrub.

So the majority of those bottles sat in my craft closet, untouched for a few more years.

Then a few weeks ago, when I dumped out all my spring project supplies onto the kitchen table and spotted them, I remembered the peanut butter trick and decided to give it a go.

How To Remove Labels or Stickers With Peanut Butter

Ok, so first things first. What kind of peanut butter do you use?

Well, the obvious answer here is creamy and the cheapest you can find. Of course, I don't like peanut butter, as I said earlier, so I had to defer to whatever was in the cabinet...and that was the chunky kind.

That's fine, it worked just the same, but given the choice, I'd go with creamy.


I started by rinsing my bottles off so the label was a little wet. Then I slathered some peanut butter over the label.

You really don't need that much, just make sure it covers your sticky spot well.

A little while later, I came back to my bottles, grabbed a paper towel and wiped the mess away.

The peanut butter and part of the label came right off with the first swipe of the rag.

I ran the bottle under warm water for the second swipe and the rest of it wiped clean away.

When I was done, I gave it a quick wash with soap to make sure all the oily reside from the peanut butter was gone, so my mini milk bottles would be ready for whatever I wanted to stick on next.

Or not.

Their new clean faces were so sweet, I decided to leave a few unadorned.

I have a cute way to use them for spring that I'll be sharing in a few days.

I also have another craft in mind that's a little more involved, but still super simple.

UPDATE!!