I’ll admit it – until now I’ve been a plain drinker. Lots of tea, a great deal of water, but not a lot in the fancy or indulgent categories, and generally I don’t have much call for glasses – I have loads of mason jars and had laser eye surgery six months ago. That being said, a friend introduced me to the joys of fancy drinks, and I’m a convert. I’ve been enjoying them with increasing regularity: bits of fresh fruit, frozen grapes or berries, club soda or tonic water, sprigs of mint, infused simple syrups, shrubs. Fancy drinks have become a sustaining pleasure, but they aren’t very well suited to a mason jar lifestyle – too much volume for so much fancy! Enter my emerald coloured glasses.
I bought a flat of San Pellegrino to enjoy in the aforementioned fancy drinks, and thought that with all of the same-sized bottles I had a good opportunity to make some glasses.
I had seen a few tutorials on making glasses and vases out of bottles, and I built a jig to hold my scoring tool and rotate the bottles. To be honest, it didn’t work out too well for me – it cut the bottles just fine, but it was tedious, pouring the hot water was dangerous, and there was too much of a jagged edge on top when it was all finished. I should have ditched the project entirely, but I had a cupboard full of emerald coloured glasses in mind and I just couldn’t let it go. I started looking for alternatives and found the Kinkajou bottle-cutting system. It went on sale on Amazon the next day – kismet! Turns out they were selling off the previous model. It’s still great, but the adjustable rubber dams would have sped up the process – as it is I distributed the project into a few sessions. Overall I’ve got about twenty tiny glasses, and four vases.
Update: Here is a fun example of a Kinkajou that is NOT a bottle cutting system.
I’m happy to report that it worked, and I’ve got enough little emerald coloured glasses for everyone to enjoy a fancy drink at once. that being said, I’ve also got a fancy bottle cutting system gathering dust, so if you’ve got a project in mind – let me know!!