Peanut Butter Jelly Time

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Above: Peanut butter slathered on some glass bottles.

I collect bottles along the roadside sometimes. I think I’ve mentioned it? Anyway, they’re usually smell, grimy, and have ugly labels on them. Today for Tool Thursday I’m going to walk everyone through my process of taking a bottle from garbage to future decor.

I only collect whole bottles at this point in time. I have a Dremel, so I could file down anything nasty and that could be an interesting exercise, but for now I have other plans. These bottles become decorated, repurposed as vases, and other such fanciness. Busted reclaimed bottle isn’t really my thing.

The first order of business is emptying them out. There might be bugs, dirt, booze, snuff… I think you get the idea. Rinse it a couple times and fill a container with a vinegar/hot water mixture to soak it in.

Several hours later you can come back. The labels will hopefully have started peeling. Take a dish scrubber after them. You’ll usually be left with a sticky residue. This, my friends, is where peanut butter comes in.

Slather it on. If you’ve got expired stuff that’s hiding in your cupboard, it will work for this.

Let the peanut butter work for at least a half hour and come back. Wipe most of it off with a paper towel. It takes awhile to get out of your dish scrubber if you don’t remove most of it. Then a little scrubbing action and ta-da! The label will entirely be removed.

Now it is a matter of washing the bottles and leaving them to dry. Because most of them have such small openings, it is a good idea to put silica in them, if you have any about. I save all of the silica packets I come across. That’s another tip for you. Silica packets: DO NOT TOSS.

I find them in shipments of baskets and sometimes vases in floral work. You might find them in shoes, medicine bottles (wait until the medicine is gone before removing them), and packages of pepperoni. You can also buy it if you have great need for a bulk amount…

And that’s it for my weird Tool Thursday. I really hope to actually have finished testing the tool I had planned for this week. Stay tuned?

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