DIY: Upcycling glass bottles

Today, months after I made my first Carlsmug, I put my glass bottle cutter to good use. I made a few goblets, a couple of small and large tumblers and a terrarium. Here are a few pictures and some learnings: 

Presenting all the goblets. They are nothing like the ones people in Game of Thrones drink from but that’s what they are. I am yet to sandpaper them and wash away the soot. If one was to drink from them right now, they would know exactly how Joffrey felt moments before he croaked.

This one in particular is my favourite. It was the cleanest cut of the day. It stands tall and confident, like a royal goblet. 

It is not that I don’t like the others. It’s just that some of their bases need to be sanded carefully so that they stop wobbling. 

Tuborg bottles make fantastic tumblers. So do Kingfisher Ultra Max. They shouldn’t be tumbling too much though. That will be injurious to their health. 

The clear Smirnoff  bottle here will make a great terrarium.

Now the learnings.

Like you cannot control the way bamboo grows, you cannot control the way glass will crack. It has a mind of its own. All you can do is scour it, heat it, then cool it and pray for it to clicnk into two separate pieces as neatly as possible. The rest can be sandpapered into perfection. The trick is to not leave any jarring glass ends, for obvious reasons. Here is a picture of all the casualties.

Some of them cracked like the bottle Bollywood heroines would use to threaten villains with rape on their mind. 

 

Some of them were held back by their best friend, the label. 

Beer bottles are the easiest to crack. 100 Pipers is the toughest bottle to crack. Check out this guy, standing strong and uncracked even after one round of scouring and multiple rounds of heat and cold torture treatment. 

And I couldn’t...just couldn’t get myself to cut this gorgeous bottle! 

So yes. I’ve had a funglasstic weekend. Must go wash the soot off my hands and clear the kitchen counter before this fat thing walks all over the glass crumbs. 

P.S: Many thanks to Deepak Nair, Anita Rane, Sushant Ajnikar and Rochelle Noronha for the many bottles that made this experiment possible.

Just like that. Just for fun.

Keeping in line with the trend of constructing more floors on top of their existing single -storeyed houses, a house opposite our apartment is expanding vertically. Judging by the pace of 

work, the upper floors will soon become a ‘PG for Ladies/Gents’ by next month. But that is not what this story is about.

The labourers working on the site live onsite in tiny, temporary, concrete houses they built themselves. These are two ten-by-five spaces built with concrete blocks and an asbestos sheet. While living on-site means work can begin early in the day, it also means the workers do not have to be away from their families. Construction projects go on for months. 

Among the people living in these houses are the two protagonists of this story - a 9 or 10 year old girl and a younger boy. I have noticed them play around the construction area ever since the project began but it was only yesterday that I stopped to take note of what they were up to. Ever since, they have been of continuous amusement to me. 

The two siblings (or friends) share some plastic toys. They have a completely green autorickshaw 
with bright yellow tyres. They have a bus that is half blue and half silver. They also have a JCB or 
whatever a muckraker is called. The body of this vehicle, the front part and the part behind it are all 
different colours. Yesterday, I stopped to observe the two engrossed in their play action outside my 
neighbour’s gate. A blue human figure lay face down. The girl had controls of the bus. The boy sat 
with his back to a metal gate waiting to roll his rickshaw down the elevated cement slope people 
make outside their homes to enable smooth parking. 

My guess was right. The two of them wanted to synchronise the time in which the rickshaw would 
ride over the human figure after colliding with the bus. I stood watching their innocent yet morbid 
game trying not to think about Salman Khan’s acquittal. 

                                             

Throughout their game, they yelled at each other for letting go of their vehicle a few seconds too soon or a couple of seconds too late. They cackled and laughed. They pulled at each other’s hair, even 
though the boy had more advantage. The cement on their clothes, the temporary pock marks on their knees caused by kneeling on the gravel, the dust on their faces and the grime in their hair are all a 
part of their game. 

This morning, from the second floor walkway of our apartment, I saw the two happy idiots rolling in a mound of gravel. They (or someone else) had put two sheets of newspaper on top on which they 
lay, laughing at nothing in particular and poking each other. I ran in to get my phone because that is what we do for fun nowadays. We click pictures of things we find interesting and put them up for 
others like us to see. 

By the time I got my phone, they were up and about again. I noticed a stack of cement made into a 
wobbly stairs. The two would climb the ‘stairs’, climb onto the wall of the house and plonk onto the 
newspapers and laugh. Then they would repeat the entire cycle endlessly. 

Why? Just like that. Just for fun.