Featured Artist: Green Illuminations

Today, I have the pleasure of introducing you to Shan and Jarod of Green Illuminations. This duo upcycles some pretty fun stuff out of wine bottles and I am truly in love with thier shop!  Which makes me extra excited to also share that they are offering a 15% discount in their shop through February 28, 2012 just for reading this post.  So how do you get your hands on this discount?  Read on my friends, read on...

Tell us a little about your shop and your art.

All Natural Wine Bottle Candle

We create candles, lanterns and luminaries from recycled wine and beer bottles. Our lanterns are popular in the summer for the outdoors. They can be hung about anywhere; trees, shepherds hooks, patios, etc. Our candles are super popular year round and in our first year we created and sold over 500 lbs of candles! We also make tumblers from recycled bottles and some odds and ends from the corks. Our most popular cork product being magnets.

We got started by making the lanterns for ourselves for our backyards and after a crafty friend saw what we were doing she suggested we try selling them. From there things just took off and we worked very hard our first year (2011) tweaking our Etsy store, getting into 9 stores in 3 states and attending nearly 30 craft shows and events.

When did you start playing with trash?

We wouldn’t really consider our materials “trash”. Glass has a low chemical interaction with its contents, so essentially when it’s cleaned and reused it is just like new. Glass can take nearly 1 million years to break down in a landfill. With our products, they are turned into a new product in as little as a few weeks!

Wine Cork Magnets

Who are the important folks/critters in your life?

Green Illuminations is a partnership. And we each have our own pets. Shan has a cat named Kumiko and Jarod has a small dog named Chinche. And of course, for both of us, all our friends and family are important!

Where do you take your inspiration from?

Most of our ideas are ours that we’ve came up with on our own. Some we’ve taken from tutorials we’ve seen around the web. Our candles specifically, there are other companies out there who do those too, created in wine bottles. And we only found that out after we started even though we had the idea on our own. There are lots of overlapping great ideas out there and I believe there is room in the market for everyone! We are the only ones I know of that use only essential oils though.

Wine Bottle Lantern

What do you want readers to know about you or your art?

All our products are created by hand. Our candles are 100% natural soy wax and essential oils with all natural wood or cotton wicks. We do custom orders, and our lanterns and luminaries are great for weddings and outdoor events!



Now how about that discount?  Head over to Green Illuminations Etsy shop, make your many selections and at checkout enter the coupon code UPCYCLEDSTUFF15 and you'll receive 15% off of your entire purchase.

Want to learn even more?  You can find Green Illuminations on the web, on Facebook and Twitter.