Wine Bottle Dish Soap Dispenser

In early December, I went to the big Galleria Mall with my husband.  This was a noteworthy event - I don't really like that mall.  I mean, it's beautiful and has tons of great stores.  It's just really big - and most of it is really expensive.  But, we went Christmas shopping there (actually, we went Christmas looking.  We ended up not buying anything...)  And I discovered something - we now have an Anthropologie store.  Not sure when that happened.  But it was certainly fun to look around.  The store was beautiful and inspiring.  As a matter of fact, I fell in love with the wine bottle dish soap dispenser -

But it was $28.  Really.  I think it had some sort of organic soap or something.  But who would spend $28 on dish soap?  Not me.  :-)  So, I decided to knock it off.  And the whole process was easy - and about $3 including the soap.  Woohoo!

I washed out an old wine bottle and removed the label.  Then, I filled it with Dawn - 

I stuffed the cork back in (ok, my husband did that part - I'm a little wimpy).

Now the fun part.  I bought a candle from the dollar store and melted it.  I put it in an old can and put that in a pot of boiling water - 

Then I dipped the top of the wine bottle into the melted candle.  I dipped, let cool for a couple of seconds, then dipped again.  I just repeated this a few times until I had the look I was going for - 

Now on to the label.  I decided to use images from the Graphics Fairy.  (Funny story - I already had this project in my head before I was selected to compete on One Month To Win It.  And I already planned on using images from The Graphics Fairy - so it was quite a coincidence when our first challenge required us to use her images.  I really loved this project and was surprised that this, along with my tea towel, didn't make it through the first round.  I'll get over it.  Eventually...).  Oh, back to the label.  I printed a dictionary page and a cold cream label - 

On a side note, I LOVE that dictionary page image.  I could think of a thousand uses for that.  Anyway, I cut out the cold cream label and a strip of the dictionary page and glued them together - 

Then simply glued them to the bottle. - 

I think it looks great with the tea towel I made.  And by the way, the framed old gate art is also a Graphics Fairy image.  I love old architectural elements so when I came across all of these images, I knew I had to print one and frame it.  I found the frame at Target - on clearance - and printed out the image.  Does it get any easier than that?  Nope.  So totaling all of this up - it's about $8 for the bottle, towel, and framed art.  Not bad.  And I think any one of these would make a great gift - so original!

Let me add a little money saving tip here - did you notice the small bottle of Dawn up in the post?  Well, I have a few of them on hand.  I try to stock up when I can get them on the cheap.  Walgreen's often has a coupon for them for $.99.  But did you know that you can use a manufacturers coupon too?  There are often Dawn coupons in the paper inserts for $.20 to $.50 - making the small 9oz bottle only $.50 - $.80.  That is a good deal. :-)

Next week I will show you a project that I had ready for the second round of One Month To Win It.  We had to be ready with our next project - even before we knew if we were moving on.  I kinda liked this project  (maybe I'm biased) so I hope you do too.  It involved painting stuff using Decoart products.  And I like painting stuff.  So stop back to see what I made.