How to Remove the Wine Label

I have a number of crafts-so-hard crafts  I do with wine bottles but before I get into that I need to tell you the first step to wine bottle crafts that led me to another craft project !!! There is always something to do!!! So what did I do this time? Read on, gentle reader.

As I was preparing to do crafts with bottles I needed  to get the label off the bottle and " dag nab it"  all that sticky glue too. Here is my technique:

Step 1: Drink a bottle of wine. That shouldn't be too difficult for you unless, of course, you are not yet 21 years of age.

 If this is your situation, (you are not 21 years old), have your parents drink a bottle of wine. Once the bottle is empty, rinse it out and fill it again with warm to hot water. Submerge the bottle into the tub of warm to hot suds. I use Dawn dish washing liquid.

Now this is important: Set the timer for 5 minutes and then work off the egdes slowly with a sharp razor.  DO NOT  LEAVE THE BOTTLE IN MUCH LONGER!!!

Most labels will come off in  one piece and if you are careful, look like this:

If you leave the bottle in the soap suds for too long, somehow the label re-adheres to the bottle and the only way off is in pieces ( the label  just shreds and it is a mess)

If there still seems to be some glue, dry the bottle and apply a little bit of this:

Rub off the goo gone with a dry soft cloth and Voila!

Now you have a clean bottle and a cool label. I collected a bunch of labels and created this with a board, some 14 cent white tiles, caulk, grout, modge podge and urethane. I will go over how I made this in another post called  A Wicker Trunk Table Topper or something like that.

 Now I can place glasses on top of this wicker trunk and they won't tip or leak into the basket. :) How cool is that? And, no I did not drink all of those wines.

Save the Pelican pillow

Hi, so this is the first day of my Crafts-So-Hard blog. I am not much of a writer but here is what I have been up to today, aka "What did I do this time?"

I want to recover some cushions in my office/rec room, but before I get into that I see one pillow I want to keep, (not recover), as is for a reason. This pillow:

was created (needlepoint) many years ago by my mother-in-law. It has sentimental value but has faded in a major way. It use to be very bright and cheery. Previously, I used fabric markers, like these:

to try and bring back the picture. They worked well for small areas, but the water area was still very washed out to me. Time for the big guns:

Of course you need a painted brush too. It didn't take very long and voila. Here is the part way result:

And the finished pillow:

It is so much happier. I will need to do some touch ups later, but now when I see the pillow I have happy memories of Virginia (my mother-in-law), who loved pelicans.

Now, I am up to something else,

Amy