Saturday July 18,2015

While Hubs is away... I have to play...

So what do you do with 100 to 125 empty wine bottles?  And an old footlocker?  Maybe I should start at the beginning of my story.

A lady at work who LOVES a good auction, bought 17 footlockers, (not old or expensive, but storage type kind that you might send your kid to college with).  When she was telling me about them, she called them chests.  She really didn't know what to do with all of them but when I told her that I might be interested in buying one from her, she brought one into work to give to me.

Fast forward a couple years, and this footlocker is still in our garage.  Long ago, I had taped off all the brass corners,and the lock on the front and primed it in white, because no matter WHAT I did with it, it would need white basecoat. 

Back up a year or so.  I had an idea to ask all my facebook friends to send me their wine labels for an art piece that was floating around in my head.  Voila!

I used a lot of them but not all of them.  Between my friend Christy and I, (lol, for not being BIG winers, we had kept bottles for YEARS, and she has hosted several parties, including those paint and wine parties, - she had LOTS!) we had a bunch of labels. Well, we spent five hours last night peeling labels off of bottles and decoupaging them onto said footlocker.  We quit after midnight, but we are still not done. 

We found that if you put the bottles in the oven at 250 for about 15 minutes, and using an oven mitt and a thin blade knife, it warms the glue and you can peel most, but not all, labels off, which we stuck to wax paper until we were ready for them.  Fact:  they must use different glue for back labels than front labels.  Those are harder to get off.  Just don't put bottles in water until cooled! 

Once we got a head start, Christy started gluing.  I had the leftovers from my art piece, and some brand new ones that I got at the Wine tasting event we went to for the last couple years.

There is still a lot of white showing, and we have about 20 more bottles to get the labels off of yet.  At this point, there are still corners curling up that need extra glue and some trimming that needs to be done, but what a cool storage place for more wine, possibly in front of the couch as a coffee table.  (Or should I say WINE table?)  And you can lock it up when the babysitter comes over! 

So now we have, oh, say, maybe a hundred clean nekkid wine bottles.  What should we do with those?  We are trying to devise a way to construct a chair for the Chair-ity Auction with them.  We have our thinkin caps on, and will probably have to ponder over a glass of Riesling. 

Stay tuned!