Wine bottles, Fire, and Safety Glasses - Oh My!

Normally I wouldn't recommend playing with fire while drinking, but for this Pinterest experiment, you need an empty wine bottle.  Ok, ok - so maybe drink up the night before you try this one out so you're a little more sober.

Everyone needs a wine bottle cut in half...right, RIGHT?  Of course you do.  Think of the possibilities...candle, wine bottle vase, pen/pencil holder - endless, I tell you. 

Here's a little secret.  I had no real desire to make a candle or add to my vase collection.  Quite frankly, I just wanted to play with fire and see if this really worked.  Apparently you just need a wine bottle, yarn, nail polish remover, a pot of cold water, and fire.  The instructions from Crafty, Scrappy, Happy are simple.  Empty a wine bottle - umm, no prob.  Wrap it with some yarn where you want it to be cut and tie the two ends.  Slide the yarn off and dip it in the nail polish remover.  Slide the yarn back onto the bottle.  Put those safety glasses on.  Seriously.  And, maybe, grab the fire extinguisher (you know, just in case).  The fun part - light the yarn and slowly rotate the wine bottle.  After about a minute submerge in cold water and magically, the bottle should separate. 

It didn't.  In fact, it didn't FOUR times.  Our bottles flamed.  The yarn burned.  We sported some pretty awesome safety glasses.  We rotated.  We submerged in water.  Nothing.  No satisfying pop that EVERYONE says you'll hear and our bottles stayed firmly unified.  While unsuccessful, the pictures are entertaining.  On a side note, I'm pretty sure our children contributed to our failure (this is a song I'm sure I'll be singing again).  We tried to be sneaky so the older ones would not curiously meander into the kitchen - fail.  We tried to distract the baby with some puffies, but the food on the kitchen floor was much more interesting.  And, to top it off, there was a diaper disaster.   

Fire, fire, fire (who doesn't love Goldie Hawn?)!

    Still Whole

Because I like my friend, Rachel, I am not posting the lovely pictures of us in our safety glasses.  

The kids' situation forced us to shut down the science lab last night, but I decided to make one more attempt tonight AFTER the children retired for the evening.  I did a little more research, consulted with Rachel, and voila - sliced bottle.  However, this was a bottle we previously flamed, so I'm guessing that's why it cracked in all the wrong places. 

Here are the differences from experiment 1 to experiment 2.

1.  I held the bottle neck toward me and tilted at an angle.  I still rotated it slowly.

2.  Once the flame was going out (about a minute), I submerged the bottle, neck down, into a pot of cold water.

3.  Finally, a satisfying crack! 

Guess I'm going to have to drink more so that I can try to get a crack free split.