Two things will always stand out when your memory tries to pass through the looking glass of your youth...wine and lava lamps. Hours of blissful contemplation were spent as you sat around drinking a bottle of wine with friends, or using it in your waterpipe in place of H2O, and watching the lava lamp perform a dancing lightshow as you went through the night in joyfuol hallucination. Well, now that we are grown-ups, and drinking a better class of wine, and not that cheap bum wine spare change stuff we could barely afford, we sometimes long for the good old days. So here’s a tip for you. You can relive the good old days, and you can do it by constructing your very own lava lamp out of used wine bottles.
You can do it from any wine bottle, any size, any shape. It’s a great way to bring back a taste of nostalgia and to have your favorite brand of wine forever immortalized in your home, serving double duty, first as a palate pleasing drink, then, when empty, turning it into a memento and lasting tribute to your youth. The lava flow of the lava lamp flowed through the inner mind with heat and colors performing their ballet of bubbles. The original liquid in motion light, as it was called, was created by Craven Walker, who called his first light, The Astro Lite. From that point on, the invasion of the UFOs of the Flower Power Body Snatchers was underway. Walker went about his tinkering and, by 1963, lit up London with the first loads of lava lamps.
Now you can not only create a lava lamp from wine bottles, but also do your green leafy green part by recycling it this way. Here is an excellent web source for construction, http://www.psychicgoldfish.com/sub_page/whatido/lavalamp.htm.
The empty wine bottle can also be used as a basic tall candleholder. Insert the candle stem into open mouth of the bottle, and voilà, a vino candelabra. The best one to use is one of those old Italian Chianti bottles with a basketweave cover to give it that “old world” look and ambience that again was so popular in crash pad after crash pad back in the day. The wine bottle is not the only eco-friendly product that can be transformed. Take your basic cork....toss it away? I think not. It's an Eco-Cork, and yes, there really is such a thing as a cork tree. Known as the Cork Oak tree, the bark is used for the production of corks. When properly harvested, taking the bark does not kill the tree as it regenerates in several years, which makes cork a renewable sustainable resource. The bark is harvested without machinery, and in Portugal which is where over half the world’s cork oak trees are, the cork oak tree is prohibited from being cut down.
Many children learn how to fish with the simple old set up of a line and bobber. There isn't really an easier way to teach a youngster how to know when the fish are biting than telling him to just watch that bobber, and if it goes under, pull hard. Although bobbers aren't terribly expensive, if you're a wine drinker, you have the opportunity to easily make some cork bobbers of your own. Whether it's for your children or you're just acting like the big kid that you still are, fishing with bobbers can be loads of fun. The following steps will teach you how to make a simple bobber from a wine cork.
Cut any metal or wax off of the top of the wine cork. Some wine bottles have a metal lip attached to the cork; get rid of this as well. Use a sharp knife, and be careful when cutting into the cork. Drive a staple into the top of the cork. A small roofing staple would be ideal; an office staple may be too small. Pull the staple up just a tad and slide the fishing line through the gap. Don't pull too hard, and use a nail if you need some help lifting the staple up and out of the cork. After you thread the fishing line through the staple, push it back down into the cork. Push it against a hard object like a table, or if you are outside, the side of a tree. Cast the line as your normally would and watch that bobber.
What else can used corks be recycled into? Used corks can be recycled and transformed into a variety of objects including, flooring tiles, building insulation, automotive gaskets, craft materials, soil conditioner and sports equipment. So much cork, and so little time!!