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.

 

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31 Days to Happily Ever After – Day 14 – Back to the Burlap

A few posts back I told you there were a dozen burlap rosettes. I used one on the card box, four for the junior bridesmaids’ dresses (photos to come after the wedding), and there were seven left. We opted to use those on some of the wine bottles and they turned out great!

We added small jeweled buttons to some, a pearl, and a broken dragonfly pin to others. The one on the right in the second row from the top is actually part of an earring that belonged to my grandmother.

We like the look so much I’m going to add a pearl to the rest of them for the junior bridesmaids and on the card box.

Here’s what they look like on the wine bottles. You can’t really see in this photo, but the bottles were first wrapped with twine around the center section of the body.

These are a bit “bolder” than the other wine bottles we decorated, but I think they’ll look great in those centerpieces.

 

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31 Days to Happily Ever After – Day 13 – What Did You Do to the Wine Bottles?

We drink wine. Not lots of wine, but it’s a hobby we like to indulge in every now and again. I used to toss the empty bottles, and always hated throwing them away, but our recycling center doesn’t accept glass, and I wasn’t thinking creatively about them then. After a huge Thanksgiving celebration with over 20 guests throughout the day, I mentioned the trash guy probably wondered just what kind of bash we had when he saw how many empties were in our pick-up that week.  That was when my sister-in-law asked me to keep them for a friend of theirs who makes his own wine. Once or twice a year I’d deliver a box of empty bottles to them as a way to recycle.

One of the very first decisions Jessica made about her wedding decor was that she wanted lit wine bottles in the centerpieces. I have drilled holes in wine bottles for strings of lights, but doing that with 40+ bottles sounded incredibly time consuming and tedious. Plus, to get the correct drill bit involved a 60-mile one way trip to the home improvement store, and strings of battery-operated light strings are $6-7 each. A bit out of our budget.

I started looking into ways to cut the bottoms off the bottles, and invested in a bottle cutting system that was supposed to work 90% of the time. There were about a dozen wine bottles in the garage at the time, and I ruined 6 of them by trying to cut the bottoms off. Even when the cuts worked, the glass then cracked vertically. It was very annoying.

I contacted a local glass shop and was shut down without hesitation. They wanted nothing to do with my project. Too bad for them. After I told that same sister-in-law about the problem (she’s an art teacher, I thought she might have a handy tip on how to do it that I had missed) she told me about a glass shop in Grand Island that cut out the bottoms of wine bottles for prom for her school the year before. The people at State Glass were more than happy to accommodate me, even making the arrangements to cut all of the wine bottles in one day so I only had to make that 120 mile round-trip once. We negotiated an hourly rate that cut the per-bottle price to less than half of their original offer.

My SIL gladly gave me back the latest box of bottles I’d given her, and I put out a plea on some local Facebook “buy, sell, trade” pages for more empties. The response was wonderful and I ended up with more than enough bottles for the number of centerpieces we need.

The labels all had to be removed, which turned out to be both easy and tedious. Some of the glue used on the labels pretty much disintegrated in a sink of hot, soapy water. Others had to be taken off with a razor blade. Then the glue residue gave me more fits. I finally used a canola oil-soaked paper towel to remove the glue. I laid the oily towel on top of the part of the bottle that needed to be cleaned, and let it sit awhile, then used the razor blade again to remove the last remnants of stickiness. That was a fun way to spend a few Springtime afternoons! LOL.

You can see how they took out a section of the bottoms, just large enough for a votive candle. This particular bottle was the first that I embellished with twine, and I took the photo to text to my daughter for her opinion.

Most of the bottles have twine around the neck, but no two bottles are the same. We chose a variety of ways to embellish them, which I’ll show you over the next few days. I can’t show the completed centerpiece, since we have yet to pick up the final element we need. They’re ordered, and will be at the store on Thursday when we do our final shopping day for the wedding. Until then, you’ll get to see the separate pieces which will hopefully come together to define the “rustic elegance” Jess is wanting.

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