Wow! Welcome back to Cut the Craft! You must have really liked last week’s craft to have returned again. Good for you. That shows excellent judgement on your part. Well done.
This week’s craft is called “Beer Bottles into Drinking Glasses“, or as I also like to call it behind its back, “An Excuse to Drink.” This craft is perfect for all you drunks out there who don’t know what to do with all those really cool beer/wine/vodka bottles you have laying around. We’re not freshmen in college (and if you are, no offense) so lining them up on top of our kitchen cabinet so we can brag about the all the handles we take down in a weekend. Cool bro. Moving on.
I was able to trace this craft from the pinboards of Pinterest back to its original source. They gave shady directions (not much elaboration) so I also watched a couple of YouTube videos to supplement my knowledge. Luckily I’m such a good explainer that you all won’t have this problem. So hold tight kids because we get to drink and set things on fire. Lets do this.
BEER BOTTLES INTO DRINKING GLASSES
(or…An Excuse to Drink)
Materials
- Empty beer/wine/vodka bottle (they used Absolut bottles but since I tried this craft out on a Monday I hadn’t finished off my weekly handle yet so I went with an old wine bottle I had been saving for no reason what so ever). Free if you have it on hand, or however much the alcohol you drink costs
- 100% Acetone nail polish remover (HAS to be 100% Acetone…otherwise you will try many times, and fail many times) $2.00
- 100% cotton yarn. Not twine. Won’t work. Trust me. $1.50
- Sandpaper. Pretty sure the grain doesn’t matter but I went with a pretty small grain. $2.00
- Scissors, you probably have these lying around so they’re free.
- Cold water. I used my bathtub for this mainly because I don’t have a way to plug my kitchen sink. Slob. I know. Free
- Fire. Also free.
- Modgepodge (optional) $5 (about)
INSTRUCTIONS
- Cut a length of yarn that will wrap around your bottle five or six times
Yes, that’s a Chaucer’s Mead bottle…Yes I’m an English Dork
- Soak yarn in some acetone
- Wrap yarn around the bottle where you would like to break to be made and tie.
- WASH YOUR HANDS. If you don’t YOU WILL SET YOUR HANDS ON FIRE.
- Light the sucker on fire.
- Hold the bottle straight up and continue to rotate it until the fire extinguishes.
- -After the fire is out immediately dunk the bottle into the cold water.
- -The top part of the bottle should pop right off. Pop!
- Dry bottle off and use sandpaper to smooth any rough edges.
- -Brag to all your friends about how amazingly awesome, talented and creative you are. BOOM.
- -If you want to keep the label on slap a little modgepodge over it and allow to dry.
Theirs
Look how smooth those edges are! How did they do that?
Mine
Yes those are wine corks, inside of a wine bottle, inside of a wine box…see what I did there?
The verdict
This craft took me several attempts to get right. I blame it on the fact that I wasn’t using 100% acetone nail polish remover. Whoops. Learn from my mistakes. Anywho. After getting the correct nail polish remover I found this to be very easy and I started popin’ and crackin’ bottles let and right. Hence why I’ve been calling this “an excuse to drink” so much. Get it? Good. To be honest, my bottles didn’t break as smoothly as the ones online. Mine were crazy jagged after breaking them, which was fine because I was able to sand them down pretty easily, but mine also had some fracture marks along the bottle. Even though this didn’t turn out exactly like the ones I saw online but I still love it! I’ve now got a wine bottle vase, a 1664 beer bottle toothbrush holder and a Bud Platinum tea light-how awesome!? Side note*I did find that some bottles were harder to crack than the others, this depends on the thickness of the bottles. I’ve found all varieties of Bud to break super easy.
I cut the craft and found that although the final product wasn’t as picture perfect as the ones online, it was a fiery success.
This is awesome. My BF works in a lab and can get 100% acetone (his major professor jokingly said he should give me some for Valentine’s day at one point). We aren’t college freshmen, but I’ve got all our wine bottles lined up above the cabinets because some of them are pretty and I don’t want to get rid of them.
I’m sure our neighbors will appreciate us blowing shit up in our kitchen. Thanks for sharing!
who doesn’t love blowing stuff up!?
This will make for EXCELLENT xmas gifts! which means I’ve got loads of time to make it right.
Thanks so much for sharing this
Everyone I know is getting one for their birthday!
Can we talk about the fire? I am very scared of the fire part. Am I going to burn my apartment down?
So that people know- 100% acetone can be bought at Walmart for roughly 2.50…
[...] in the video above seems to be one of the safest methods we’ve seen (another method involves soaking thread with acetone and setting a third of the bottle on fire). So follow along with his video and you will have your own personalized drinking glass made from a [...]
You can buy a glass bottle cutter from Jo Ann Fabrics online for about $30; it even resizes so you can do wine bottles or beer bottles or anything in between. It makes for a much smoother cut so less sanding and less likely to be cut by the jagged edges
I tried many times using lacquer thinner instead of nail polish remover. (that’s all I have right now) and it worked but my bottles just have a huge crack down them.