Bottle Light

I need a new light in my dining room. I’m on the hunt for an old fasioned chandelier (to pair against Mrs. Snow), so in the meantime, I’m gettin’ funky.

When I gave up Diet Coke earlier this summer, the gradual phase out included a few weeks lemon-lime soda consumption. It’s not much better for you than Diet Coke, but it was as close to Diet Coke methadone as I could get. For a couple of weeks it was straight soda, then I started buying it in mini-bottles so I could just pour some into a glass of water to hot my sweet-n-fizzy spot at the same time. Eventually that phased out and I moved on to non-sweetened seltzer, then mostly water, which is where I am now. Aren’t you fascinated by this? I know I am.
I discovered two things in the lemon-lime soda phase. 1. You can replace 7-Up for lemonade in an Arnold Palmer and it will knock your socks off (add extra lemons for a kick). And 2. 7-Up bottles are really pretty when they are empty, clean, and cut to bits.  Like this!

Materials

• 10 clean plastic bottles (free)
• 1 plastic light bulb cage ($2.19, found in the electrical supply section at the hardware store, popular at construction sites the world over). 
• 10 zip ties ($1.00)

Cutting the bottles is the hard part. get yourself a sturdy pair of kitchen shearsand turn on the movie, it could take a little while.

Binding the bottles to the outside of the bulb cage is easier if you spread them out a bit. I nearly gave up half-way through to swap it out for wires, but the sip-ties work just fine. Before you trim off the tails, make sure you arrange them in a way that the cage can close around your light bulb (I learned that one the hard way). 

Shazam!