junk no more: tracy’s blue vase
Hello, my name is Gina and I have a junk problem…
My husband, aka: MrFabulous, and I tore up a perfectly fine kitchen in our modular home (beach trailer) a few years back. The cabinets were really cheap but somewhere in the rubble, I found two pieces of wood that I couldn’t bare to toss. You see I have this hoarding keeping problem.
I threw the two pieces of lovely wood in my art studio with full intentions of making something fabulous out of them the next week. That was 4 years ago. When we moved from our house recently, I had the much dreaded task of cleaning out my she shed turned art studio so that the new owners (my son and DIL) could enjoy the shed without all my treasures (junk) that I had collected since 2003.
Fast forward to 2018. My bestie, Tracy, was visiting me at the beach and found some wine that she liked and that she could drink around the pool because of the cute little dark blue plastic bottles that it came in. She finished the first bottle and got up to throw it in the trash. Oh, the horror! I mean this girl has known me for 30+ YEARS! She has seen my art studio and all my chaos. She has heard me say that I am the creator of art junk. She knows that I am crazy! What was she thinking? Was she really going to throw all six of those bottles away? After scolding her and collecting the bottle for a future project, I found out that she had already thrown one of them away and there was no way to retrieve it. RIP cute little precious dark blue bottle. The other five little bottles also went into storage in my art studio. When I moved, I saw the bag of bottles and threw them in the back of my Jeep. They ended up beside the two lovely pieces of wood and a project idea was born
how to…
If you have bottles and wood and want to create some recycled junk art too, here is what I did:
First things first: getting the labels off of the bottles was not FUN. I almost gave up but then remembered that I had a bottle of lemon oil with me. Problem solved.
Cute blue bottles without labels and one bottle with the label and wine in tact. Tracy must not have seen this one. 🙂
Next was drilling the holes in the wood so that it would rest on top of all four bottles and create a vase. I asked Mr. Fabulous to help me with figuring out which drill bit to use and went inside to get my camera to document the drilling. When I returned, he had handed the job off to our neighbor and the drilling was done. Thank you, Little Nick!
After sanding the ugly stain color off the wood and smoothing them out, it was time to glue the bottles to the base. This was easy to do once I put the top on and marked where the bottles should sit. I wish I had stained the wood a modern farmhouse approved dark stain, but I forgot to do it and the glue was already dry.
I think this junk-to-treasure turned out great! Tracy, this is your very belated birthday gift and you can pick it up the next time you visit me at the beach. You cannot have my pom pom flowers though because I love them big.
PS – if you want to learn more about how lemon oil can support your body (and remove labels) give me a shout at [email protected]. I would love to chat with you about my addiction – Young Living Essential Oils.
