Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Wine bottle art

Even before A and I moved into our new apartment, we started talking about ideas for DIY projects, which both of us enjoy immensely. Over the years, we had collected (or thought we did) quite a few wine bottles and I decided to give A an ultimatum - we either use it or they're gone. Out of this was born the idea of a wall art piece using the said bottles. When D heard about it, she was super excited as well. So one cloudy afternoon, the three of us embarked on a journey to the nearest Loews to try and figure out what we needed to implement our idea. Mind you, we just had a vague understanding of the implementation at this point, and were not even sure if the tool we needed existed.

As we wandered across the many aisles in Loews, we came across a kindly guide (read: Loews employee). We quickly explained to him what we were trying to achieve. His look as he heard the idea spoke volumes - I am quite sure he had decided by then that we were three geeks with lots of time in our hands and no idea how to use/pick the right hardware.
Anyway, after looking at and rejecting a number of options, he finally pointed us to the one clamp in the entire store that could fit our need, as well as all the other ancillary items. After promising him that we would come back with a pic of the final product, we quickly selected our colors and went on our way.

The first task at hand was to paint the wooden board. Since none of agreed on the right shade, we just poured a dark green and a white to the count of 'tick tick one' on the board and used our brushed to mix the two colors together. Let's just say that we weren't entirely thrilled at the result. nevertheless, we let the paint dry.
The next hurdle was to find the mid-point of a circle. Given that we were three engineers, you'd think this would be easy, but alas no! Without any tools (no protractor, scale, compass) we were quite pressed to find a solution. Finally with a thread and some approximation we marked our center and the end points, drilled the holes, attached the clamps and forgot about the project for a week.
After we finished moving, it took us a while to realize that we did not have all the bottles we needed. So we had to have friends over to drink up some wine :) Only after that, did we finally attach our bottles to the board.

I LOVE the end product and it looks glam on our wall, AND the project was soooo much fun!



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