Wine Bottles

     I work at a locally owned wine and cheese shop downtown on Main Street. One of the never ending debates revolves around what to do with all our waste. If the owner had his way, it would all go in our green dumpster in the alley. Since I have been working there, I take the glass bottles and extra cardboard across the river to the recycling center. With our new wine bar and wine tasting room, we go through a lot more wine that we used to...probably about 4 times as much as before. Right now my truck is full of empty wine bottles and today I wanted to figure out a way to reuse some of them.
     A few months ago, I bought a glass cutter off the internet. I used it to score a line all the way around the bottle. Then I dunked the bottle alternating between a pot of boiling water and a pot of iced water.

Final product after sanding the cut edges with glass sandpaper.

   These turned out the best out of the ten bottles that I tried. The top edge isn't perfectly straight on all of them because of the way the glass separated. I kind of like it that way. 

   With the top neck section, I used some old keys and a piece of driftwood I picked up on Thanksgiving on Lake Erie in Cleveland to make a wind chime.