Marco...Wino...

It's been awhile since I've posted! I haven't started any big redesign projects at the house, and have been busy keeping up with online orders, and gift shop sales. Today's post will be a bit shorter than normal. But here it goes...

Love this pic...shows the dang foil that is a pain to get off the top of the bottle.

I get asked a lot about my wine bottle meat and cheese trays and how they are made, where the bottles come from, and how I got the idea. Wine bottle "slumping" has been around for a long time. I saw it first while I was on vacation in California touring the vineyards and thought to myself, "I can do that!".  At the market little kids always want to know If I flatten each one by driving my car over it...however cool that would be, it's a little bit longer of a process than one might think.

First I collect hundreds of wine bottles from generous people everywhere! Whether it is my Mom donating after a party, or my friends bringing over the "good" colors that are hard to find, or me biting the bullet and running to the wine store to find the hard to get black bottles and selflessly drinking my way through it for art...I always seem to rack up a pretty good collection.

My new Wine Rack!

Currently I have about 300 wine bottles in stock ready to slump and be made into Serving Trays. I found this awesome wine rack that holds 96 bottles on Craigslist and for $30.00 I feel a little more organized with my collection.

Dusty bottles before getting clean.

After rinsing the bottles I used to spend hours scraping the labels off one by one till a little "googling" led me to a new trick. By placing the bottles in the oven at 175 degrees for 10-12 minutes I'm able to heat the adhesive that holds the label in place and pull it off in one swipe. Pretty slick little trick and I'll never go back to my old ways!

Bottles end to end.

I really like the light in this one!

After all labels and foils are removed the bottle makes it's way to the kiln. Each bottle is laid on it's side on thinfire paper and fired for 12-18 hours.  When the firing process is done, the bottle is flattened and I can begin to package the bottles with knives and labels that tell about the product.

Slumped Wine bottle before packaging.

Labels and knives added.

Ready to ship out!

Viola! My next challenge is making spoon rests out of beer bottles.  I had an order placed for 6 of those yesterday...I'm thinking I may need to get some beer drinkers over to help me with that 6 pack!