Don’t bin old wine bottles – they have a clever use

In the age of recycling, a television personality has devised a method for repurposing empty wine bottles to avoid having to discard them.

Dragons’ Den’s Sara Davies took to TikTok to demonstrate how you can “pimp up” your bottles to craft a beautiful decoration for the home. “If you’re anything like me then you’ll probably have a load of these in the recycling,” she began in a video.

However, Sara suggests soaking off each bottle’s label to create a clean surface to work on. Once dried, she got down to business. “I just used some spray paint to create a nice base of white, and then you can start to get fancy,” she explained.

The Dragon chose a deep shade of blue, applying acrylic paint to the upper half of a bottle, intentionally creating an uneven transition into the white. “Once that dried, I took it to the next level with gilding flakes!” Sara continued. “It just gives a wonderful bit of sparkle.”

Sara then applied the silver gilding flakes, advising: “Remember, you’ll need special glue to make the gilding flakes stick.” She then demonstrated how to transform her designs into centrepieces.

Selecting wild flowers from a bouquet, she placed them into the bottle, declaring: “I think they look super cute. You can have them around the house and at the front door – they make lovely little ornaments.”

Impressed, one TikTok user wrote in response: “I love those bottles, this is the stuff of inspiration, thank you! Now I can spend hours in my retirement creating beautiful art!”

“Love this,” remarked a second. “I decoupaged mine and was really proud of myself.” Meanwhile, a third recounted: “I dripped loads of different coloured candle wax down two bottles like we used to do at school and put candles in each one at Christmas for my table and the nostalgia hit me like a ton of bricks.”

Sara has recently been busy on TV with her latest BBC series The Big Idea Works.

Described as a fusion of Dragons’ Den’s investment acumen and The Repair Shop’s creative repair wizardry, Sara, together with an expert team of engineers, transforms the aspirations of inventor hopefuls into reality.

Among the clever inventions showcased are a “sugar pen” for detecting drink sugar levels, an innovative mess-free bird feeder, and a pillow engineered to reduce snoring. The series is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.