We get through a lot of alcohol. It’s not big, it’s not clever and we aren’t proud of it. But at least we’ve got an excuse – we own a mobile crepe stand and becasue we specialise in wedding catering and private party catering, then the alcohol options on our menu are always popular. People like to celebrate with good food and they also like to celebrtate with alcohol. Put the two together – alcohol-flavoured crepes – and it means we get through a lot of alcohol in the space of a year.
We decided a long time ago to put the empty bottles to good use where possible, so we keep the more distinctive ones – the dark-coloured Baileys bottles and the stylish, old-fashiond Grand Marier bottles (complete with decorative wax seal) – and have employed them to various good uses. Some were partially melted in a kiln with the labels re-applied to create weird, distorted bottle ornaments. Others were used a candle holders. For safety reasons, most candles these days are made of non-drip wax, but the dripping variety can still be found. A Grand Marnier bottle with multi-coloured wax caked to the side of the glass looks very 18th Century and can look pretty stylish in the right environment.
Moving forward a few centuries, using empty bottles for table and wedding venue decoration in a more modern style can look quite impressive and is easy to do:
Old wine bottles as candle-holders
The first stage is to simply collect a few dozen empty wine bottles. How you go about this is entirely up to you. You could commit to drinking a fewe bottles a week, host a few prties (perhaps weven with crepes as catering) or ask nicely at your nearest pub for a few empties.
The next stage is to spray them with the required colour of paint – in this case, metallic silver or gold – and your local art shop will probably be able to supply you with an inexpensive acryllic paint (as long as you don’t look like a grafitti artist) which will be easy to apply.
Buy a few candles, maybe add a couple of stick-on bows and there goes another job you can safely cross-off your wedding ‘to-do’ list.
Next job: contact Original Crepes about hiring a crepe stand to provide candlelit crepes at your wedding.
