Weekend Project #1

After straightening up my apartment I was feeling very crafty.  I worked on 3 different projects today.  I'm waiting for one to finish drying and another one I have to finish tomorrow, so you will have to wait on those pictures.

We had a couple of unfinished bottles of wine leftover from the Super Bowl.  I knew they weren't ever going to get finished so I dumped them out and rinsed them.  This is of course a pinterest inspired craft, however I didn't use anyone's tutorial specifically, I just gave it a go on my own.

What you need:
Wine bottle
yarn or twine
hot glue gun
tacky glue
felt

Step 1:  clean and wash your bottle.  If possible take the labels off - not possible on this bottle!

Step 2: Hot glue your yarn to the bottom of the bottle

Step 3:  start wrapping the yarn around the bottle.  I was gluing the yarn every so often and pulling it very tight.  At first I was using the hot glue gun, but then switched to tacky glue because it was more workable and less visible.

Step 4:  Here's where it gets tricky - when you get to where the bottle gets smaller it gets tough.  You can't pull it tight because the yarn won't stay.  I started using the glue gun here and made very small (very very very small) dots every inch or so in order to hold the yarn in place.  However, it doesn't look very clean.  This part was difficult and I would like to see if other people's tutorials give tips on how to handle this.  Eventually it got skinny enough where I could just hold the yarn in place until I finished the bottle.

Step 5:  Finish off the bottle by wrapping up the lip of the bottle and gluing the end of the yarn in place with the hot glue gun.

As you can see it got a little sloppy where the bottle gets skinnier and I started using the glue gun.  I decided to put on a couple of the felt flowers from this wreath tutorial on the bottle to hide the sloppy part.

To make the felt flowers:
Step 1:  Find a circular object and cut a circle in your felt (the bigger the circle, the bigger the flower)

Step 2:  Cut the circle into a spiral starting from the outside and working your way in.

Step 3:  Starting from the outside, roll the felt until you reach the center.  Hot glue the last bit of felt to the bottom.  Then simply glue the flowers onto the bottle wherever you want.

This is part of my decoration on my sewing table.  Easy and cheap, it's all stuff I already had in the house (except for the brown felt) and it adds a little something to my sewing table to make it look more decorative!  Let me know if you try it out!