Have you bought a pair of earrings made from a recycled bottle of Jameson, Bombay Sapphire or Guinness off me? Wanna know how they were made and why? Let me tell you all about them!
The more I learn about the glass industry the more I realise that we need to look at ways we can use glass that is already in existence. There are 2 troubling facts that is driving this decision for me.
1. We are running out of sand in the world. The main ingredient in glass is sand!
2. Virgin glass is more polluting than virgin plastic. This one hit hard.
Now glass wins the environmental race as it is infinitely recycle-able, and we are very good at recycling it. But there is lots of glass already in existence that we can use instead of getting new glass. Which leads me to my own work and using drinks bottles to create jewellery.
Step 1:
Drink the contents and remember to have a really good time!
Step 2:
Clean the bottle, break it and then pull it into stringers!
Step 3:
Take those stringers and wrap them onto a mandrel to create disks or beads.
Step 4:
Remove the beads from the mandrel and clean out the bead release from inside the holes. This is particularly fun to do with the hollow beads!
Step 5:
Make the earrings!
FAQ:
They're glass will they break?
The glass used to make bottles is a really strong glass. It has to be to protect the precious liquid inside. Have you ever drooped a bottle and it bounced? The beads are very strong and are very unlikely to break even if dropped.
That being said it is still glass and accidents do happen!
How long does it take?
The videos above are edited down or they would be very boring! Each bead takes a good few minutes and the hollow ones up to 10 mins each. Not to mention the other steps of cleaning, breaking and pulling stringers which took me 2 days to get all of the stringers I could manage out of one 70cl Jameson bottle!
If you have any more questions about your earrings drop me a line and i'll be happy to answer - hello@wildbirdstudio.com
