DIY Lighting Ideas
22 DIY Wine Bottle Crafts to Make From Empties
DIY wine bottle crafts for the empties in your recycling: tiki torches, a bird feeder, garden edging, alcohol ink lights, gold vases and custom labels.
Empty wine bottles are the best free craft supply there is, and the recycling bin takes them away before most people think of a use. Here are 22 DIY wine bottle crafts that get to them first. A few are serious projects, a chandelier that needs the bottles cut and the ceiling rewired, a bird feeder that needs a hole drilled through glass under running water. Most are not: garden edging, a coat of gold spray paint, a string of fairy lights pushed down the neck, a label printed at home. The tiki torches turn a plain patio into somewhere you want to sit after dark. Most projects link back to the person who worked them out, and when the empties run out, our wine cork crafts are the obvious next stop.
1. Santa Wine Bottle
A bottle of wine dressed as Santa, which turns a perfectly nice but slightly boring gift into the thing people photograph before they open it. The whole build is a sock and a scrap of faux fur: the sock pulls down over the neck to make the hat, the fur becomes the beard and the trim, and a pom-pom finishes the point. In the weeks before Christmas the bottle stands on the table as decor rather than waiting in a cupboard. It costs almost nothing on top of the wine, and it works just as well on sparkling cider for people who do not drink.
Get the full tutorial at Sueeye.
2. DIY Wine Bottle Edging For Your Garden
Bottles sunk neck down along a bed so only the bases show, making a scalloped border of colored glass for the price of nothing at all. It is a look that turns up in magazines and outside expensive little restaurants, and it comes down to burying bottles in a straight line. Colored glass is what sells it, so save the green, blue and amber bottles rather than the clear ones, and sink them deep enough that they do not shift when somebody steps on the bed. A weekend job at most, and there is a video tutorial for the whole thing.
Get the full tutorial at Sueeye.
3. Wine Bottle Tiki Torch
Empty bottles turned into tiki torches, and the build is four steps and about five items. Wash the bottles and get every scrap of label off, then fill each one a third of the way with pea gravel and pour citronella torch fuel through a funnel until it almost reaches the base of the neck. Push a half inch by three quarter inch reducing connector into the mouth, feed the wick down through it and leave plenty sticking out the top. Let the wick soak properly before lighting it, because a dry wick burns itself rather than the fuel. Citronella keeps the mosquitoes off the patio.
Get the full tutorial at Sueeye.
4. DIY Modern Herb Garden From Recycled Wine Bottles
Bottles hung in a vertical run off a length of quarter inch copper tubing, each one holding a herb, and the whole thing comes in under thirty dollars. Inhabitat credits the design to Ben Uyeda, who built it for FreeGreen, and the point of it is space: this is the herb garden for a flat with a balcony rail and nowhere to put pots. Copper is the material that makes it look designed rather than thrifty, and it weathers to a soft brown outdoors rather than rusting. A single afternoon, and there is a video on the page showing the whole build.
Get the full tutorial at Inhabitat.
5. Stenciled Wine Bottle Glitter Vase
Stencils, glitter Mod Podge and a pouncer, which Real Creative Real Organized recommends for exactly the days when your hands are shaky or you do not feel creative, because a good stencil does the hard work for you. Clean the labels off and swab the bottles with rubbing alcohol first. Plan the fit before you start: she got three repeats around one bottle and had to leave gaps on the others. Then pounce Mod Podge through the stencil, lift it, sprinkle glitter over a cookie sheet to catch the mess, and wait twenty four hours before the next pass. Three passes means a three day project.
Get the full tutorial at Real Creative Real Organized.
6. Decoupaged Wine Bottle
Old maps torn up and collaged over a bottle, which gives a texture you simply cannot buy: type and coastlines and contour lines running in every direction at once. Karen Kavett made a video showing the map collage specifically because it was her favourite of the decorative bottles she had been making, and the appeal is that any paper with fine print works, sheet music, book pages, atlas pages from a charity shop. Group two or three finished bottles with a single stem in each rather than a full arrangement, because busy paper and busy flowers fight. The video walks through the whole thing.
Get the full tutorial at Karen Kavett.
7. DIY Wine Bottle Chandelier
Six cut bottles tinted in different colors and wired into a pendant cluster, which is the most ambitious project on this page and the one worth clearing a weekend for. Saved by Love Creations squeezes Mod Podge Sheer Colors into the cut end of each bottle and twirls it until the inside is coated, then stands them mouth down overnight to drip and dry. The wiring uses standard E27 pendant kits, cut at the socket side of the switch, threaded up through each bottle so the socket wedges into the taper of the neck. Kill the wall switch and the breaker before you touch the junction box.
Get the full tutorial at Saved by Love Creations.
8. Wine Bottle Bird Feeder
A bottle hung upside down over a saucer, with holes drilled through the glass so seed trickles out as the birds empty it. The Garden-Roof Coop is blunt that drilling the glass is the hard part. Use a diamond drill bit a little under half an inch, which suits sunflower chips and safflower but is tight for whole sunflower seeds. Keep the bit wet the whole time, start at forty five degrees with the drill already running and ease it to ninety, and never push, because you are grinding, not drilling. Slow right down at the end, lift rather than push, or the bottle shatters. Wear eye protection.
Get the full tutorial at The Garden-Roof Coop.
9. DIY Frosted Ombre Wine Bottle
Frosted glass paint sponged up a bottle in a gradient from turquoise to white, and the finish reads uncannily like sea glass. Saved by Love Creations cleans the bottle with rubbing alcohol and a lint free cloth first, then works from the bottom up: turquoise applied lightly with a cosmetic sponge, then turquoise mixed with white through the middle, then pure white at the top. Thirty minutes to dry. The step that makes it is the last one, a light coat of white frost over the whole bottle, which ties the bands together into a proper gradient instead of three obvious stripes.
Get the full tutorial at Saved by Love Creations.
10. Alcohol Ink Bottle Lights
Alcohol ink dripped down the outside of a bottle, sealed under glaze, with fairy lights tucked inside, and The Navage Patch puts the active work at under ten minutes. The finding worth having is that the ink goes on the outside, not the inside: inside a narrow necked bottle the alcohol vapor cannot escape, the ink never dries and the whole lot pools in the bottom. Work over foil and paper towel, start with your darkest color and let it run down the side, fill in with lighter shades, then give it twenty minutes and three coats of triple thick glaze before the lights go in.
Get the full tutorial at The Navage Patch.
11. Twine Wrapped Bottle Vase
Twine wound from top to bottom over decoupage medium, which turns any glass vessel in the house into something that belongs on a fall table. The Country Chic Cottage lays the decoupage on thick with a craft stick rather than a brush, then presses the twine into it as she winds, which is what stops the rows from sliding apart as they dry. Colored twine is the part most people miss, since the usual natural jute is only one of a dozen shades sold. Group two or three in different heights, put flowers in one and pens in another, and you have a centerpiece and a desk tidy.
Get the full tutorial at The Country Chic Cottage.
12. Wine Bottle Hummingbird Feeder
A bottle inverted into a snap lid bowl, with feeding holes punched around the rim, and no glass drilling anywhere in the build. Mad in Crafts found in her research that hummingbirds are drawn to red above every other color, which is why shop feeders are red, and she hunted down a bottle that was actually red glass rather than clear glass holding red wine. Cut an X in the plastic lid just big enough for the neck to squeeze through, because a snug fit is what stops the bowl dropping off, then punch feeding holes around the edge with an awl. Six feet of heavy floral wire wraps and hangs it.
Get the full tutorial at Mad in Crafts.
13. Twine Wrapped Wine Bottles
Bottles wrapped top to bottom in jute and finished with fabric roses, buttons and pearls spelling out a word across the set. Her Campus lists four supplies and no more: a bottle, twine, Elmer’s glue and something to decorate with. Knot the twine at the mouth, wind downward, and start adding glue as you reach the wider shoulder of the bottle, which is where the wraps want to slip. Glue and knot again at the base so nothing unravels. Four bottles side by side spelling something short is the version that photographs well, and it makes a good twenty first birthday gift.
Get the full tutorial at Her Campus.
14. DIY Wine Bottle Art with Chalkboard Paint
Bottles brushed matte black with chalkboard paint and hand lettered, which is the easiest way to get a set that looks like it came from a homewares shop. Cohas gets a whole set out of one two ounce tube: soak the bottles twenty minutes in warm water, lift the last of the label with Goo-Gone, then brush the first coat on in vertical strokes and the second, twenty to thirty minutes later, in horizontal ones. Do not letter it the same day. Fresh paint lifts away with the ink the moment you try to correct a mistake, so leave the bottles overnight and write on them with a white chalkboard marker.
Get the full tutorial at Cohas.
15. Laced Wine Bottle Vases
Bottles with white paint run down the inside and a band of lace wrapped round the outside, holding a single stem of Queen Anne’s Lace. Hostess with the Mostess soaks the empties for thirty minutes in warm soapy water, peels the labels, chases the rest with adhesive remover and stands them upside down on a drying rack until they are dry inside and out. Then the step that makes it: white paint squirted into the neck until it runs down the inner wall, left to set behind the glass. Lace ribbon goes on last with a dab of hot glue, and the bottle is filled halfway with water.
Get the full tutorial at Hostess with the Mostess.
16. DIY Photo Collage Wine Bottle Label
A photo collage printed at home, Mod Podged around a bottle and finished with glitter over the bare glass, which is Twinspiration’s homemade anniversary gift. Build a seven photo collage on PicMonkey using the FB Cover layout, print it landscape on plain paper, and black and white is the recommendation. The step worth copying is the double layer: glue a plain sheet of white paper to the bottle first, let it set, then Mod Podge the printed collage over it, because a white backing keeps dark photos from disappearing into dark glass. Then brush more Mod Podge over the bare bottle and pour glitter on.
Get the full tutorial at Twinspiration.
17. DIY Wine Bottle Succulent Planters
Bottles cut down and planted with succulents, and the whole project stands or falls on the cut. La Crema’s advice is patience: rotate the scored bottle slowly over a candle flame, then test the weakened line with an ice cube, and each bottle can take up to ten minutes to pop open. Never force it apart, because a forced bottle breaks badly rather than cleanly. Buy a few extra bottles to practise on, since the first one or two rarely work. After that it is soil in the base, the succulent repotted in, more soil pressed gently around it.
Get the full tutorial at La Crema.
18. Gold Painted Wine Bottle Vases
Bottles masked with painters tape and sprayed gold, which Homey Oh My builds around one product, Rust-Oleum Metallic Spray Paint in Gold, described there as a holy grail DIY weapon. The technique that decides the result is the taping: scrape over the tape edges with a credit card so the seal is tight, or paint creeps underneath and the stripe goes fuzzy. Rubber bands instead of tape give alternating spacing. Shake the can hard, start spraying off the edge of the bottle and sweep across, and build light coats rather than one heavy one. Twenty four hours to dry properly. Stray paint scrapes off with a fingernail.
Get the full tutorial at Homey Oh My.
19. String Light Wine Bottle Lamp
A single hole drilled near the base of a bottle, a set of battery powered LED string lights fed inside, and that is the lamp. Handycrowd gives you the choice at the start: drill a hole big enough for the cable, about six millimetres, and pull the lights in from the top, or drill eight millimetres and push the bulbs straight through. Keep the bit wet with water or light oil the whole time, using a little moat of blu tack to hold the water, and if you see dust you need more lubricant or the heat will crack the glass. Drill about ten millimetres up from the bottom.
Get the full tutorial at Handycrowd.
20. Painted Wine Bottles
Bottles sprayed white and then dipped in color with a deliberately ragged painted edge, so a set of three reads as a coordinated arrangement rather than three odd bottles. Crafts by Amanda starts with a white spray base over clean bottles, then uses three colors of acrylic craft paint or chalk paint on top, which is why the finished colors sit so evenly on green and brown glass alike. The jagged line between the white and the color is the whole design and it is far more forgiving than a straight one. It is also a very good project for a craft and wine evening.
Get the full tutorial at Crafts by Amanda.
21. Glittery Ribbon Wine Bottle Craft
Glitter ribbon wrapped around bottles with a single letter on each, so a row of four spells a word across a shelf. Real Creative Real Organized made hers as a reminder of her word for the year, which is a nice use for something that would otherwise be seasonal: unlike a Valentine’s or a Christmas version, a word you actually mean stays out all twelve months. She used Offray glitter ribbon, and the number of bottles is simply however many letters you need. Alternate two colors along the row rather than using one, because it breaks the word into shapes and makes it read from further away.
Get the full tutorial at Real Creative Real Organized.
22. Custom Wine Labels
A printed label wrapped around a bottle, which is what lifts it from something grabbed off a shelf to something clearly chosen. The cost is a sheet of paper and the effect is disproportionate: a label naming the person, the date or the joke turns the least imaginative gift at the party into the one that gets kept. It works for hosts, for weddings where each table gets its own, and for Christmas, where three bottles in matching labels look like a set. Design them once and the file is there every year afterward.
Get the full tutorial at Sueeye.
