Wine Bottle Centerpieces

When trying to figure out what centerpieces we wanted, we did a lot of searching online and had found many beautiful centerpieces made from wine bottles and we loved the idea... so we set to saving bottles, asking our friends for bottles, and even asking a restaurant for bottles.

Thing was, with our colors we didn't think the brown or green bottles would look that great... this left only clear and blue (the harder ones to collect).

In all honesty - taking off all the labels was the most work. We tried it a bunch of different ways, but found that soaking then in hot water with dish soap helped the most - and then for anything that was left over we used an anti-adhesive creme (from the auto store).

 Then we had to figure out what we wanted to do with them - we tried three different things and honestly ended up going with the easiest - but we truly thought it looked nicer. We started with the most complicated and cut the bottles to use them over candles.

We got a cutter that went in the top of the bottle and that we could wrap around the bottle to cut it. We got it here.

Since our first thought was candles, we started cutting a few. The two methods that worked the best were slowly pouring hot water along the etch/cut line and then dunking it in ice cold water OR keeping a pot of boiling water on the stove to dunk the bottles into, let them sit for a little bit, and then dunk into ice cold water. Honestly, the second seemed to result in straighter cuts/less cracks. Sadly we only took pictures of the first method though.

<line up the bottle>

 <etch your cut line>

<you can slightly see the etched line in this picture>

<slowly pour hot water over the line while slowly turning the bottle>

 <Sit in cold water>

Repeat until breaks, we usually got them to break from 1 - 3 tries. If it didn't break by the third try, it was usually because we didn't have a good etch line for the thickness of the bottle we had. Brown ones were the easiest to break smoothly and the blues seemed to be the most complicated.

<Broken bottle>

From here I didn't get any more pictures but we sanded the bottom of the bottle for any sharp edges and tried to sand a little dip in part of it so that it wasn't perfectly smooth. If the bottom was completely smooth and flat, the candle would burn out from not getting enough air. So we had to make the bottom a little uneven so that extra air could get in. It was not enough to just leave the top open.

So our candle tries were as follows:

Plain glass bottles on a mirror tile with glass beads:

Plain glass bottles on a mirror tile with glass beads and some extra candles on tile:

Glittered bottom bottles on a mirror tile with glass beads:

We couldn't figure out what else to put on the tiles to make it look right to us and this just looked too plain. So we tried to see how it would be with those water gems and a flower... our sample one was with blue water gems and a rose from the front yard. Even though we knew that wouldn't be what we'd do, we figured it would give us a good visualization to see if we liked it more than the candles. 

And we decided we liked it enough that it's essentially what we ended up doing. However we kept it simple and just used clear water gems. Here's a picture of the final piece... granted sadly we didn't get the best shot of it. 

We ended up liking the shape of the sparkling wine bottles the best and so we did have to drink a few more bottles after changing our minds about the candles. 

Hope this gives you a few ideas - honestly there is so much you can do with wine bottles, I think the possibilities are endless. 

During this whole process I also ended up giving two bottled gifts. One with a stuffed animal inside and one filled with golf balls. I only got a picture of one, but it gives you the idea :) The ribbon is tied around where the bottle was cut so that it can't be seen.

I've also seen cups and planters out of bottles and every now and then I want to try them. We ended up recycling all our bottles once we were done figuring stuff out with the wedding so for now, I'm out of bottles. But I'm sure I'll be experimenting more eventually and sharing more bottle ideas with you :)