As Carol Ann mentioned last week we love recycled materials and will be featuring an item each week and how to transform it. This week’s items is a soda/water bottle. I have been creating these flowers for about 4 years now and have found many uses for them. One example is the chair I designed above for a charity benefit to support local arts programming for the homeless.
What you will need
- Soda Bottle
- Scissors
- Spray-Paint
- Newspaper
A note about bottles:
· Thin bottles such soda bottles and water bottles work best for this project. Thicker bottles like that which Gatorade and Vitamin Water come in are to thick and not suitable for cutting with scissors.
· Each bottle has a unique shape and texture that will lend itself to differing flower designs have fun and experimenting with different bottles to get various designs.
1. Take the cap off your soda bottle and clean the bottle by swishing some water around inside. Be sure to keep the cap!
2. Remove as much of the soda bottle label as possible by slipping a pair of scissors under the label and pulling away the remaining sections. 
3. Squishing the bottle in the center with your hand, use scissors cut a slit in the side of the bottle half way down from the neck.
4. Slip the scissors into the incision and cut around the circumference of the bottle.
5. Decide what length you would like your petals to be.
6. Then shorten the distance between the end of the bottle and the neck by making a new cut around the circumference of the bottle.
7. Determine the number of petals you would like your bottle to have.
8.You can have as few as 4 or 5 or as many as 15-16. Make incisions from the end of the bottle to the neck.
9. Once you have all your petals divided shape each petal by rounding corners adding points or cutting them in whatever shape your heart desires.
10. Pull back each petal flipping them inside out and creasing each at the base of the petal.
11. a Now that you have your flower created you ready to begin decorating. Spread your newspaper out on the ground outside placing the flowers on top. Make sure that you are protected from the wind so the flowers don’t blow over and your paint doesn’t drift away before it reaches the flowers.
11. b Holding your can of spray paint about 6-8 inches above the flowers begin spraying them by moving the can back and forth over the flowers until they are the shade you like.
12. Once spray painted let the flowers dry for about 30 minutes before touching the paint. You can use multiple colors of spray paint for a multi-color effect or add embellishments with markers or acrylic paint. Here are a few of my designs.
If you would like to attach the flowers to items as I did with the chair. Drill a hole in the cap of the soda bottle then thumbtack, screw or nail it to your wall, door, shed, or art project. Then screw on the flower!
I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial. Let me know your thoughts and be on the look out for next weeks transformation.
~Adj
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