Wine Bottle Tiki Torches

As you can tell from my barrage of gardening posts lately, Justin and I have been spending quite a bit of time outside. When all the plants have been watered and the bric-a-brack has been put away, we like to sit out on our covered back porch if it’s not too terribly humid. Unfortunately, Georgia’s state bird—the mosquito—loooovveess to get me all the time!

Tiki torches have helped, but since our porch is raised off the ground, they tend to come right at ponytail level to me when I’m sitting down. I’m one of the clumsiest people you could meet so we had to rethink that option for my personal safety and for Justin’s sanity.

 

Luckily, I came across this tutorial and found the easy solution to our problem. In the interest of being fair, the one pictured above is from the tutorial. Ours look like this:

     

I really should take a short photography class since I’m flooding y’all with pictures all the time! The best part? Drinking some of the wine we got at Hillside Winery from our anniversary trip in Tennessee. Last night we had a raspberry frizzante, which is basically sparkling wine. Loved it!

 

Of course, one does not have to use wine bottles for this. Mama and I were talking the other day how glass Coca Cola bottles would be great for smaller versions. Justin thought it would be cool to use a Seagram’s 7 bottle. We didn’t have any extra hardware to hang this one up though.

 

The gears are turning, so I’m sure there will be several different versions of these on our porch throughout the summer. It was great to be able to recycle some old bottles and they were relatively inexpensive. I think we have less than $5 in materials in each of these. They’re selling on Etsy for $18!

On a completely unrelated note, I hate frogs--or rather the idea of them--and I think they know it. I have a beastly toady frog that makes his way up onto our porch every night. Justin says it’s to eat the bugs that are drawn to the light inside but I think he just likes to see me squirm.  If he really wanted to eat some bugs, he’d go to the bottom of the porch stairs and eat the barbequed ones that fall below the bug zapper. Anyway, I digress. Mow watched this one for at least 20 minutes last night. It’s like they were having a staring contest. It was hilarious!