MUGI – My Unique Gift Idea

A quick follow up to our wine kits post. You can find these at artsy displays and street fairs, usually in hippieish parts of town where all the artisans are selling recycled trash-into-treasure that makes you want to dive into the nearest landfill and see what you can sell. But then it smells bad, so you just leave it up to the artists to figure out. Besides, they don’t need any more competition from landfill diving enthusiasts like you.

These flattened wine bottles will always have guests asking where you bought them, and you telling people, and then you being labeled as the local cool guy that’s really thrifty and all your neighbors will start asking you thrift advice. Plus, if you can afford purchasing your own wine-bottle-flattening equipment, which would probably be something like a very large Bunsen burner, you could sell these yourself at $18 bucks a pop and be a rich thrifty guy.

I’ve seen these made out of all kinds of Absolut bottles, Glennfidich Whiskey containers, Greygoose Vodka bottles (“A vodka of uncommon brilliance”) made into clocks (like this one), platters, dishes, flamethrowers (ha ha). Maybe Nokia can mold one into a new cell phone cover and it’ll start a new fad and an explosion of wine-bottle-awareness committees. I’ve even seen a shoehorn.

A melted wine bottle shoehorn. That must have been a starving artist. Fortunately, no committee on shoehorn awareness has yet been established..