Bottled Water Bottle Canopies and Curtains
February 13, 2015It’s amazing what some people can come up with when they set their minds to it. While it is common knowledge plastics are one of the worst biodegradable substances we use today, there are a lot of creative people finding beneficial and long term uses for leftover plastic containers.
One of the most creative and inventive uses of plastic bottled water bottles that we have seen is a canopy cover. This piece was created by American artist Garth Britzman, with help from students of the University of Nebraska. It took 200 hours to create. The structure is comprised of over 1,500 empty water and soda bottles, each filled with a little bit of colored liquid to create a very interesting atmosphere. This piece is titled (POP)culture.
At Azure Water of Leesburg, FL, we understand you might not have 1,500 watered bottles laying around waiting to be turned into a canopy, but you can still take advantage of this same technique. If you’d like to create a colorful and handy shade for your screen porch, try the following.
Colorful Shades For Your Porch
To begin, peel off any labels so you have clear plastic bottles. We’d recommend saving roughly 20 bottles for this technique.
- First, start by connecting the bottles top to bottom. An easy way to do this is by running a long piece of string through the caps and bottoms of the bottle. We used a safety pin to poke the holes and help guide the string. It is much easier to feed the string through the bottle from the bottom to the top since you can unscrew the cap and create a larger opening to pull the string for the next bottle. Continue doing this until you have enough bottles to reach from top to bottom. Once this is complete, you will know how many bottles you need for each vertical strand.
- Keep creating vertical strands of bottles until you have enough to cover the width of the area. The strands will hang around an inch apart from one another or you can space them farther if you’d prefer. Keep in mind this can be customized any way you’d like.
- Now, to add some color. We used tissue paper to stuff into our bottles. Since this was to shade the sun setting on our porch, we went with vibrant yellows, blues, reds and oranges, which played off the setting sun nicely. You can also use markers to color the bottles and provide a similar effect.
- Once we finished with our tissue paper and creating our colorful design, we attached the top of each strand to an old curtain rod and then drilled that into the wood above the screen. This enabled us to pull the bottles back like a curtain or let them hang.
At Azure Water, we care about the environment and want to help you find more ways to recycle your old plastic bottled water bottles. Our bottled water bottles are eco-friendly and biodegrade in ten months. If you’d like to learn more about neat ways to use your bottled water or want to read more about our water, please connect with us on social media, check out our website and contact us today for your free sample!