glass

How-To: Bottle Cutting

With a bottle cutting jig, you can easily recycle your used glass bottles into reusable drinking glasses or flower vases. After scoring the glass with the jig, there are a few different ways to make a clean break. In this video, I show how to do this using a candle flame and a piece of […]

Using a plastic bottle label as a built-in etch resist

Using a plastic bottle label as a built-in etch resist

One of our most-trafficked original tutorials over the past couple of years has been this simple trick for etching designs on glass bottles by using the label itself as a stencil. It’s a quick, satisfying, inexpensive project that yields long-lasting results with common equipment. In the process of porting the original blog post to our new Make: Projects platform, I took the opportunity to revisit the idea, updating the old images and adding a couple of helpful details, all of which was refreshingly easy using the new interface. Check it out.

Lego ship in a glass bottle

Lego ship in a glass bottle

Not to be confused with this Lego ship in a Lego bottle. Something very like this stunt has actually been on my personal to-do list for about six months now (well, I was gonna build a Lego spaceship in a glass bottle), but I kept putting it off. “Jeremy Moody built the first Lego ship inside a bottle!” is the headline over at Brothers Brick. Oh, that stings! [Thanks, Rachel!]

Reblown bottle glasses

Reblown bottle glasses

Glassblower Nick Paul of Chicago drinks beer. (Hopefully, he has some friends who help him out with it, from time to time.) Then he takes the empty bottles and blows out their necks to make flat-sided tumblers. Then, in a stroke of packaging/marketing/recycling genius, he puts them back in their original six-packaging and sells them through his online storefront, Windy City Glass. The tumblers have smooth, rounded rims and are annealed to relieve internal stresses. No part of the original bottle is wasted. I love the green-on-green simplicity of his Heineken glasses, above, but the gestalt awesomeness of his Arrogant Bastard Ale tumblers, pictured below, may prove irresistible to me. If I know me, you folks have about an hour after this post goes up before I cave in and buy them for myself.