My mother-in-law gave me this Bottle Chopper last year when she cleared out lots of craft stuff to move house. I fell in love with the idea of it instantly but didn’t get around to having a go with it until yesterday. In all honesty the fact that the contraption needs to be assembled like a piece of MFI furniture put me off for a while (I’m not good with spacial tasks and instruction leaflets) but craft starved, due to work, over the past couple of weeks I decided I was hungry enough to tackle it.

Let me say, before I used the Bottle Chopper I had all sorts of romantic ideas about the lovely recycled glass items I could cut out and paint. Not cigarrette holders and ash trays but perhaps pretty glass bangles, mobiles and ornaments. Little did I know.

I should have been warned by the boasting statement on the box “As demonstrated on Tomorrow’s World”. For anyone who never saw the science and ‘technology’ TV programme Tomorrow’s World it basically consisted of various demonstrations of inventions that you knew would never catch on – Actually, that’s not strictly true, I just looked up the wikipedia entry for Tomorrow’s World and there is a long list of  widely used technologies which were first shown on the programme (like camcorders, CDs and the breathalyser).

The Bottle Chopper does not work in the way I expected (which may explain why it hasn’t been as successful as the compact disc). There’s no chopping involved whatsoever, just scraping and lots of tapping. The Idea is that you score around the glass with the little blades and then tap the bottle all the way around, on the score mark, from the inside which (apparently) evenly cracks the bottle and splits it apart.

Well, it does work like that but I’m guessing that it only gives the desired results if you’re very patient (not me), you don’t mind getting tinnitus (not me) and you wear protective clothing for the tiny shards of glass it throws out. The tap-tapping must be gentle and even all the way around. You should not tap-tap gently until you can’t bear the sound anymore and then just whack the bottle with one big swipe from the outside. This does not give an even edge.

This has to be the most convoluted and humorous craft I’ve ever tried. I was giggling all the way through it.

To be fair to the Bottle Chopper, Yvonne Dockree and Tomorrow’s World, I can see how it would work, you just need to get the knack. So, this isn’t the end of my glass recycling schemes, just an interlude.