31 Days of Happily Ever After – Day 23 – Back to the Wine Bottles

It’s been more than a few days, but we’re back to the wine bottles we used in the wedding centerpieces. I talked about preparation of the bottles and getting started on decorating them here.

Each wine bottle was different, and there were lots of positive comments and compliments on all of them. Several people asked to take one home. There are a few I want to keep, and some specifically for Jess and Scott, but we are more than happy to share the rest of them. That’s the ultimate compliment, to be asked to share. The ballroom manager was interested in them and told me that in the 20 years he’d been there, no one had ever used wine bottles with candles for their centerpieces. I don’t think he was complimenting or criticizing, he just was interested.

Like I said in my previous post (linked above), I started out by wrapping twine around the neck of most of the bottles. The original idea was print song lyric quotes on tags and attach to each bottle. We did that to several, and they looked great. Jess was given a couple of old keys, so we tied those on a few of them. This instagram photo was taken by one of the groom’s best friends from high school. She took this one home, and raved about them on Facebook.

 

Jess had also started collecting vintage brooches, thinking maybe she wanted to make a brooch bouquet to carry instead of fresh flowers. After starting this project, I was in the antique mall/flea market, and found a very pretty vintage brooch. When I got home, I just pinned it to the twine on a wine bottle so I would remember to show it to her. That was the beginning of adding brooches to them. The photo is small, but I circled the brooch. It’s my favorite one.

You can see that we also etched some of the bottles with designs. Some have the monogram Jess chose to use on her invitations, others have just random curly-q’s  or flowers. I cut borders from contact paper using my Cricut, then used etching cream from Hobby Lobby. It’s really an easy project.

Lastly, we used the burlap rosettes we made, just wrapping twine around the middle of the bottle and using hot glue to attach the rosette.

These were a relatively easy and inexpensive project for the centerpieces, and seemed to be a big hit at the wedding. I can’t wait to see the photographer’s pictures of them -  they were really excited about all the handmade touches we had.

 

The Nester's 31 Day Series