Wine Bottle Light.....eh, not so much

I love bottles. The colors. The shapes. Everything. So when I saw, out there in blogland and pinterest, a super simple, fast way to "cut" a glass bottle I decided to give it a shot. I have not seen any step by step pictures of this process and thought I could be of help in that department. So I set my camera up to document the entire process.

Here are some examples of bottle lights you may have seen. The first one is a Pottery Barn light that uses whole bottles with a light in the middle.

My kitchen with bottles on the window ledges.

Or...how cool to recycle bottles into drinking glasses!

* I was so nervous about trying this! I set up in the bathtub, wore goggles and gloves in fear of the glass flying everywhere. One set of blog instructions I read said, "light string on fire and wait for the bang." WTF!!??  I was unsure what a "bang" with a glass bottle would entail, but I was prepared for the worst.

Here were the steps that I read about online: 1. Soak a string in nail polish remover. 2. Tie a few times around bottle. Place string where you want to cut the bottle. 3. Light string on fire and turn the bottle slowly. 4. Submerge bottle in cold water.

I let it burn for about a minute (no bang??) and then submersed it in my bucket of cold water. That's when there was a "BANG!!!" I peeled myself off the ceiling  pulled the bottle out of the bucket and...

TA-DA!!! But not straight, and a million little cracks around the edge. So many cracks that I would never be able to sand it smooth.

So I tried again up higher on the bottle and it just got worse.

Plus... it was starting to look and smell like a meth lab  (not that I know how a meth lab smells)!!!

FAILURE

I wonder if scoring the bottle first would have given a cleaner, crack-free cut. ???  I'm sure breathing in all those fumes killed a big chunk of the few brain cells I have left, not to mention all the other terrible things that breathing in those fumes did. I think I'm sticking with cutting tools, like a Dremel or a tile saw. That way it's only my fingers I'm putting in harm's way. When I succeed in making a light or drinking glasses out of a bottle I'll be sure to gloat about it explain and photograph it step-by-step in a future tutorial post.