For information about my bottle chandelier in Tap Social please go to my bottle chandelier page here.

It’s about time I revealed my hoarding of bottles which started with casually finding a bovril bottle and it’s now ballooned out of control so that every shelf, cupboard and surface is covered with bottles.

It’s important at this stage to point out that all the bottles have been dug out by badgers, as revealed when the nettles have died back in the winter. I have not been partaking in bottle digging which is unlawful and makes a horrid mess.

What shall I do with all these bottles? Well they’re not worth much – people are selling 5 for a fiver on ebay- could they be repurposed as lightbulbs?
With the advent of cheap electronics from China and reliable LEDs there are a variety of options – the simplest is something I’ve found on Big Clive’s youtube channel here:

This involves taking the base of a bayonet filament lamp and building the circuitry as part of the support structure of the filament, and in this case placing it in a test tube.

I will be substituting the test tube for a 1930s bottle with a neck of similar diameter. The LED filaments are compact, have good heat dissipation and are pretty similar in colour to tungsten filaments.

I painted on some titanium white ink which brings out the text and I’ve made a very crude ‘chandelier’ with some wire joiners, bulb holders and bamboo sticks.