A friend of mine came up for a few days and we decided to be "crafty" and try a few new things. We epoxied my dining room table and made some drinking glasses out of bottles. Sometimes I forget how fun it is to create! Here's my "ocean" table - it didn't turn out how I expected, and I still have some work to do on it, but I think I still like it.
And some of the glasses (some still need sanded down - we used up all of my sandpaper). These ones will be a set. Hopefully I'll be able to sand down the big oops on the brown one!
Your table is fantastic - one of a kind. I love it.
I have a question for you concerning the bottle/glasses. DH has been doing this with wine bottles and he can't get the new rim super smooth. The rims end up smooth-ish, but cloudy from the grinding and polishing.
The table was a comedy of errors. Seriously, neither of us had ever used epoxy resin like that and we learned a lot! I had a heater going to keep the room warm enough (there were lots of warnings that it must be at least 75 degrees, and we chose a day that was low 70s), and we put the epoxy too close to the heater so it started curing in the container. Big mistake! Then I had forgotten to make sure the table was level, and my dining room floor was not, so it all started dripping off one end. There are a few spots I need to fill in with a bit more colored epoxy, but then sanding it down and one more coat should be good. I did use a heat gun to help with bubbles. Now that I've done it once I'd love to try again. I'm going to look for some end tables or something!
As for the glasses, I just got a bottle cutter off of Amazon and we just started going for it! It was pretty easy once we got the hang of scoring, but our success rate was probably only 50%. Bottles from Pepsi co. did not work at all! One tip if you do end up doing it. You have to dip them in a hot and cold bath. I learned to not hold the bottle by the neck because it puts too much pressure on the bottom that you want to keep. Hold it by the bottom and it works much better!
And a fun tidbit. We went to a local deli for lunch and they have tons of funky soda bottles. The guy thought I was high on something because I was rubbing all of the bottles to see which ones were painted instead of labeled. Anyway, we got to talking and he gave me a bunch of bottles for free and said to come back anytime and he'd start saving them for me! So nice!
I have a question for you concerning the bottle/glasses. DH has been doing this with wine bottles and he can't get the new rim super smooth. The rims end up smooth-ish, but cloudy from the grinding and polishing.
Most of mine end up a bit cloudy as well. I'm not sure how to fix it, but it doesn't really bother me.
Can you give us a brief 'how-to' tutorial? I have a table in my classroom that I would love to do!
I just went on youtube and found a few videos. But it looked a lot easier than it really was! It is definitely a 2-3 woman job for such a big surface. I also think that doing a single color would be pretty simple. Trying to manage multiples made it a lot more complicated and was part of the reason our epoxy ended up starting to cure before we had poured it.