I’ve been really busy preparing for the holiday season (and being in the midst of it seems to involve a lot of work too!) so I haven’t had a whole lot of time for going out and finding inspiration, going to the fun fairs and festivals that never seem to end around here, or crafting – other than wine bottle lamp production that is. I saw something near the start of my “Etsy dream” that mentioned I would need to have a successful shop up and running before Thanksgiving if I had any hope of utilizing any part of the Christmas/holiday rush! I feel relatively confident about the state of my shop right now (which hasn’t changed much since Thanksgiving). And amazing news…. It worked! I had one sale from a friend buying a Christmas present for her aunt (still awesome, but less exciting) AND a sale to someone I have no connection to!!

Of course, because this is how things go, my customer (!!) wanted something a little bit different from what I usually do. She ordered a champagne style bottle (big, bulky, thick glass) and instead of wanting the bottle decoupaged or embellished at all, she wanted it to simply look like “a full bottle of Prosecco”. This threw me off guard to begin with, especially because in order to drill the hole, I’d had to remove the label she liked so much. It is quite easy to get the label on looking nice after decoupaging, but to put it back on a flat bottle looking just as great as before you took it off? That’s a little trickier.

I succeeded in getting the bottle/label just the way I wanted it! Then I was thrown another challenge. “Can we make it hang?” she asks? Well. Um. Maybe is my first thought. I eventually came up with, what I believe is a very clever solution! If you’ve ever seen a bottle of sparkling wine before, you know there is a metal cage holding the cork on. Well. I happen to have kept a few of those cages (you know… for those ‘who knows when I’ll need this’ moments), which are actually called a muselet. I simply attached it to the top of the bottle, as shown, and provided a stylish (but I’m hoping strong!) black ribbon.