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Bottle Art

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Today’s post comes to us from Aboksu.

In 2018 I retired after 39 years of life in Taiwan. I moved to Holland, MI, and bought a hundred year old house in the city. 

The town was platted out sometime in the 1960s, and included alleys in the middle of blocks.  One by one, the city “vacated” many of those alleys, but some remain.  Near our house there’s one that a community association “neatened up” within the last 10 years. It’s an “art alley”.  One back yard installation included a few racks of colored bottles on poles. They attracted me. I figured I could do that, myself, in my own yard.

After examining the installation, I decided that I could do it cheaper too.  I sent out a request for empty bottles on a neighborhood bulletin board, and got “not few” responses, sometimes linked to statements that “we didn’t drink all that wine” or “the bottles accumulated over a long time.”  (That’s Holland, MI piety speaking).  My own installation, because I did it on the cheap side, blew apart in the wind more than once. Lots of bottles and red vases smashed before I finally figured out how to make it secure.

As I live and drink, I accumulate bottles regularly. Three windows in the garage were “bottled up” in 2022. More racks and installations have taken places in the yard.  As I write, there are 50 bottles and vases, drilled and washed, waiting in the basement for another inspiration to strike.  

Tell me about your last inspiration!

71 thoughts on “Bottle Art”

  2. I grew up quite close to northwest Iowa, a hotbed of Dutch Reform piety. I imagine it is intense in Holland, MI.

    I have to think for a bit about inspiration.

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    1. And I grew up a few years earlier than Renee, and 50 miles south of her in NW Iowa, 20 miles from the same hotbed of Dutch Reform piety (Orange City and Sioux Center, Iowa). Those towns stage a Tulip Festival each May. One of my dearest high school friends sews the Dutch costumes featured during those celebrations. These areas are more sparsely populated than Holland, MI (or Holland/Netherlands, EU) but intensely conservative in all ways.

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        1. That is in South Central Iowa. It is a lovely community, but conservative. I lived quite close to Pella for a year when I did my psychology internship at a nearby VA hospital. Good butcher shops and a great bakery. Traditional Dutch architecture.

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        2. They have a tulip festival, too. The tulips are planted a month before the festival in
          May, and are already sprouted out so they bloom quickly without needing to be planted in the fall. After the festival the tulips are dug up and thrown away.

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        4. I wonder if you go down to Pella with a big bucket when they’re digging up the bulbs, if they would let you have them?

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        5. I don’t see why not. Years ago a friend of mine was working for the state agency responsible for landscaping around the capital and other public areas. She would clue us in to when bulbs would be available after they were done blooming in the spring. As I recall, there was preference given to public or boulevard gardens, and local garden clubs were often notified of the availability of these bulbs.

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      2. When you consider how progressive the Netherlands are, Amsterdam at least, it’s curious that all these Dutch-dominated communities in the midwest are so conservative. Is there a big disparity, I wonder, between the city and rural areas in the Netherlands or is it the case that the severely conservative Dutch emigrated?

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        1. I think that the communities here have been isolated . I can imagine that Amterdam is thought of as a hotbed of vice by these folks, but they probably think the same of Sioux City or Des Moines.

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  3. Husband thinks getting our Cesky Terrier was recent inspiration, as well as a glaze for a ham he concocted the other week using Lyle’s Syrup and mustard.

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  4. Rise and Find a Spark, Baboons,

    Aboksu, I love your bottle art! Thanks for posting this. Now you are a source of inspiration.

    I discovered, much to my surprise, during the social isolation of the pandemic, that my inspiration to move forward to make stuff comes from friends. During the isolation, my group of artist friends ceased meeting and dining together. I lost every ounce of creativity or desire to fashion polymer clay into anything without the presence of the energy these people provide.

    The other source of inspiration is nature and art. I like to make embellishments for wine glasses. I have a celestial theme —moon and stars; a flora theme—flower and leaves; and a quilt theme—grandma’s quilts. This winter I designed an ear warmer embellishment for my lovely DIL. It is a butterfly that I will recreate. That inspiration came from the butterflies in my garden. I try to attract them with pollinator habitat.

    Off to work, then home to pack for our 1 month trip to AZ.

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  5. Farm land around Orange City, IA is going for $30,000 an acre these days. One would need considerable inspiration to buy a farm at those prices.

    I also read that a Danish company is thinking about building a $100,000,000 biofuels plant in my home town in southwest Minnesota that takes the methane out of manure, converts it to usable fuel, making the leftover manure usable for fertilizer, but far less stinky. Whoever came up with that idea was inspired.

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  6. My father was a high school sports official for decades, and did a lot of refereeing in northwest IA, which he always referred to as “The Holy Land”. He often didn’t get back from Saturday games until after midnight, and always made a point of filling the car up with gas before he left the town he refereed in, since no gas stations would be open after midnight because it was the Sabbath, and they wouldn’t work on Sunday.

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  7. Husband and I have been working on a loaner puzzle that came in a box of 4, enclosed only in a zip-lock bag. Owner had mistakenly included it in the box, but it isn’t one of the puzzles pictured. Have you ever tried working a 1000-piece puzzle with no picture to guide you? Husband started and wouldn’t let up.

    We’ve done the “low hanging fruit”, and learned enough to identify a theme: San Diego Old Town Market. Yesterday I thought to do a web search, and lo and behold, found the puzzle pictured on Ebay. We can now proceed.

    Stay tuned for more great inspirations…

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    1. I have never really thought about what a different experience it would be to put a puzzle together without knowing what the finished picture will depict. Seems like it would make the process much more difficult.

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    1. Guinevere will hardly even go in the bathroom even when the water is not running. But Nimue loves to be in the warm steamy bathroom when YA is showering. In fact last night, YA came in and scooped her up off my bed and said “oh I need my shower buddy.”

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  9. A friend from Canada made a lot of granny squares from scraps of wool yarn. She posted them on Facebook and the resulting blanket is so pretty! I have a lot of scraps too, so that inspired me to start making granny squares.

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  10. I am oathed to a triple deity. Years ago, I wrote prayers to two of Her faces, but have always had much less of a relationship with the third, and so the project stalled. The last couple of years I had a spiritual crisis around that aspect of Her, and the prayer seemed impossible to complete. But, about a month ago inspiration struck and the third prayer was written! I bought a lovely iridescent glass St. Michael chaplet to be repurposed into polytheist prayer beads. The prayers I wrote for the three aspects will be prayed on the three Hail Mary beads, and one that I wrote for Her/Their father will be prayed on the Our Father beads. Hopefully it will flow well; the prayers are a bit longer than the Christian ones and will take some memorization.

    I also bought a traditional rosary (wood and paracord) which I intend to repurpose for a deity from a different pantheon. We’ll see if He’s okay with His rosary only being prayed on His day, otherwise my prayer life is about to get very busy indeed…

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    1. Despite my early exposure to Catholicism, I don’t know anything about the origins of rosaries. Obviously they have utility as a counting mechanism but I’ve often wondered if they could have at one time been symbolic of an actual pilgrimage—a map of shrines along a route.

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      2. It’s an intriguing theory! A common theory is that the rosary originated in India and was transmitted first to Islam, then through Islam to Eastern Christianity and then to the West during the Crusades. The rosary came to symbolize the 150 Psalms–it became a way for laypeople who didn’t have the time or education (or money for a book) to pray the Hours, in imitation of monastic life. However, historical research is always turning up new information, so who can say?

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        1. And things evolve from other things. My original insight was that, if a route was well defined a string of beads could function as a representation of waypoints. It made me wonder if aboriginal artifacts seen merely as ornamentation or totems could have had another purpose.

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        2. We need another lifetime to find the answer to questions that didn’t occur to us early enough in this one. At this stage of my life I find that I have more questions than answers, a stark contrast to when I was sixteen and knew everything.

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        1. Since I can’t respond to your other post, Renee… years and years ago I used to collect komboloi from the Festival of Nations. I still have a few of my favorites!

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  11. @billinmpls, this may be a bit of a tangent, but a couple of books examine the idea that myths codify astronomical information (I’d say along with Sallustius that’s ONE level at which the myths may be read, but the authors are of course not polytheists). One is Hamlet’s Mill, about the Greek myths, and the other is The Secret of the Incas. I have yet to read either, but they certainly sound intriguing.

    More to your point, I have zero doubt that artifacts from oral cultures encode historical, botanical, medical, ecological, spiritual, and who can say what other information, but sadly the key is usually lost with modernization/Westernization and the items can no longer be interpreted as they would have been.

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    1. Yes, we’re “caretaking” some of these books by Graham Hancock that belong to our friend W (in the nursing home). We’ve enjoyed GH’s Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse which, though scoffed at by traditional archeologists, contains some really interesting theories.

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  12. Another tiny inspiration – After returning from choir practice the other night and finishing dinner, Husband sat down in his reading chair by the “fireplace” and just sort of meditated there for a bit, without turning on the reading lamp. Instead of continuing with my busy-ness, I pulled up a chair, turned off the other lights except for the Christmas ones in the windows (I keep using these through January), and did the same. It was a wonderful bit of quiet, and I hope I’m inspired to do it again.

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  13. I love this post, Abukso. Are all of the photos above of your work? I’m especially fond of the “screen” in the header photo. I can imagine how lovely it looks with the sun streaming through the different colored glass. As I look at it, I am struct by my imagination wanting to experiment with this idea.

    I have always loved bottles in different shapes and colors, and have a small collection of them. I use them mostly for vases for a single stem. A couple of them are rectangular, clear Watkins bottles, another couple are pale green in an unusual shape. Those two originally held some foul tasting Asian elixir to which my late friend, Diadra, attributed healing powers. In her case, it didn’t work, but I can’t bring myself to simply recycle them.

    Crowgirl, I’m fascinated by your spiritual practices. I confess to know very little about these things, but I have no doubt they’re meaningful to you. Are you a member of a group centered around these practices, or is this your own individual exploration of a deeper connection to the Universe?

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    2. Thank you. If they weren’t meaningful I wouldn’t put all this work into them, believe me! ;-D Unfortunately it’s very difficult to find like-minded, fully-functional people to practice with…or maybe it’s just me, IDK. I am a member of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, but they’re a small and far-flung organization; I’ve never even met the one or two other members in Minnesota. My practices really developed from intensive reading of a number of excellent book and blog authors (primarily John Michael Greer and Galina Krasskova) on one hand, personal spiritual experiences on the other, and a fair amount of trial and error on the third.

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  17. I knew a philosophy professor from Grand Rapids , MI, which is also a very Dutch town not far from Holland, MI. . He was of Dutch heritage, and said one obsession he found quite amusing among many Dutch people he knew from back home was their concern with their bowels, and the anxiety they had when their bowels didn’t move at the same time each day.

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  18. My father’s family was from just across the river from the Netherlands in Northwest Germany, in Ostfriesland, or East Friesland. My last name is Dutch, but the family and most folks from that area never considered themselves Dutch. The founder of the Mennonite faith was from their town, and their religion was Anabaptist, not Calvinist like the predominant Dutch culture, which the Dutch tried to impose on them when the Netherlands ruled there. The Dutch province across the river from where my ancestors came from is called West Friesland. My father’s family was insistent they weren’t Dutch, and would have little to do with the “real” Dutch people in their area of North West Iowa. They attended Baptist churches, not the Dutch reformed churches in the area.

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    1. No, I wouldn’t say the best in the US. But I don’t know all of the children’s museums, but ours here in Saint Paul is very good and Indianapolis has a fabulous one. City Museum in St. Louis is excellent but it’s a little show-offy. I don’t know how to explain it; there’s a lot of space for space sake. Does that make sense?

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  20. During te last cold snap we had in December, I was inspired to freeze and ice heart. Something that I saw somewhere, maybe on Facebook, a couple a years ago. You use a heart-shaped cake pan. Put i some natural elements like small pine cones,cinnamon sticks, walnut shells, evergreen springs, and maybe a few colorful things like red berries or artificial flowers. Add a length of chain or jute or raffia for a hanger. Pour in water, distilled is best for clarity, and freeze. Then unmold and hang where passersby can see it.

    Might do another this weekend.

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    2. It didn’t last very long – it formed a rather interesting long icicle at the bottom and dripped for a couple of days, then fell off its hanger. The neighborhood snowpeople fared better.

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  21. Pingback: Bottle Art – rosdahal

  22. Not sure if I was in the right place for a while. Absolutely not the European Amsterdam! I love what you can sometimes find when you go ‘Discovering’. I did hope for some helpful hints on how to achieve this, but I’m currently gazing at my small patio, wondering how I can achieve this. Collecting bottles is the easy bit 🤣🍾. Cheers!

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