Summer Camp Crafts with our Friends: Upcycled Beer Bottle Garden

We've been busy having fun with some summer camp-inspired crafts at The Bruery, but we want to see what you've been creating, too. Contribute your craft to The Bruery Blog by entering our Summer Camp Crafting Blog Off. Our third contributor, Lena Starbird, turned a bunch of her favorite empty beer bottles into adorable little succulent planters.

Shortly after getting married in late 2008, I was diagnosed with stage four Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and six months of aggressive chemotherapy treatments followed. We quickly discovered that life is way too short to drink bad beer and after winning that one I jumped off the wagon to celebrate and soon added microbreweries to our roadtrip must-do lists.

Somehow this snowballed into a substantial collection of empty beer bottles that were just too pretty to toss in the recycling bin. So when our tiny condo began looking like a terrible episode of Hoarders, we came up with the idea for a Craft Beer Garden outside on our patio.

Summer Camp Crafts with our Friends: Giant Scrabble Wall Art

We've been busy having fun with some summer camp-inspired crafts at The Bruery, but we want to see what you've been creating, too. Contribute your craft to The Bruery Blog by entering our Summer Camp Crafting Blog Off. Our second contributor, Lauren Obregón, cut and painted these super giant scrabble letters as wall decor.

My husband and I just moved last August to the LA area from Boston. Almost exactly a year into being CA residents, I was going insane not having anything on our walls (ok, we've NEVER had anything on our walls-- on either coast). It looked like we were living in a men's college dorm. So, this last Monday morning I decided that by Monday night we'd have art.

Summer Camp Crafts with our Friends: Beer Label Letters Decoupage

We've been busy having fun with some summer camp-inspired crafts at The Bruery, but we want to see what you've been creating, too. Contribute your own craft project to The Bruery Blog by entering our Summer Camp Crafting Blog Off. Our first contributor, Kim Parsons, gussied up her walls with some super giant beer label art.

I needed some beer art to go on the walls of a friend's restaurant & brewery. So I came up with this Beer Label Letters Decoupage project.

Summer Camp Crafts with our Bruers: Chris D.'s Upcycled Wood Barrel Planters

When I was a kid I hated helping with yard work at my parents house. It was mostly raking up leaves from a giant sycamore tree my parents planted when we first moved into the house I grew up in. As I’ve gotten older I’ve fallen in love with gardening. I now understand my father’s obsession with giving life to seedlings and watching them grow.



Not everyone has space for a garden or has a backyard. Thankfully, container gardening on a patio or an apartment balcony can be enough for most everyone. Recently I wanted to add a few fruit trees in my backyard and I thought that putting them in into wood barrels sounded like a great idea. It adds a nice decorative touch to an outside area and most dwarf or ultra-dwarf fruit tree varieties do well in a container.

Summer Camp Crafts with our Bruers: Cambria's DIY Floating Beer Bar

While swimming around in Mexico/tubing down the Owen's River/floating on Lake Isabella, I needed a way to have my beverage float alongside me while I was in the water. Most of the time I'd just hold it, but sometimes you need to have your hands free to use a squirt gun on someone. It seemed like an obvious solution to this problem was simple: add some stabilization to my already buoyant beer koozie. Now the only problem I faced was that I hadn't come up with a way to do it myself ... yet.



This project involes two main parts: a koozie and a float the koozie sits in. You can opt to attach the float it to your koozie with glue, or just slip it on without glue so you can adjust the buoyancy of the whole thing as you empty your beverage. Your float will be a looser fit depending on how big you cut your holes.

Summer Camp Crafts with our Bruers: Victor's Reclaimed Pallet Herb Garden

This is a project that arose from the desire to create a vertical herb garden that wouldn’t occupy much square footage since the rest of my backyard is pretty much occupied with growing several varieties of the hottest peppers in the world.

I had seen a few Etsy posts from my wife that touched on the subject and gave me a good head start in the design department. I didn’t use any one specific set of directions, rather I just pulled the best ideas from several sets of plans that I had decided were the best fit for what I wanted. This project really doesn’t require any set of specialized skills as long as you can use a few basic hand tools and a circular saw.

Summer Camp Crafts with our Bruers: Matt's Tie Dyed Tank Tops

Last summer, we ordered some tank tops to be sold in The Bruery Tasting Room. Warm weather, beaches, beer festivals, outdoor concerts, BBQs ... sounds like tank top season to me! But, we ended up with quite a few of these tank tops left over.

As I was looking at the pile of white tank tops with their bright multi-colored The Bruery logos, I thought back to a bluegrass festival I attended with my dad a few weeks back. I was a little surprised to see a few other attendees sporting their tie-dyed brewery shirts that day. That’s all the convincing it took. We were about to have some hippie-inspired, hand-crafted, tie dyed The Bruery tank tops.

Summer Camp Crafts with our Bruers: Benjamin's Barrel Stave Bottle Openers

I drink a lot of beer and therefore have quite a collection of bottle openers. Not like I really need them since I’m well versed in opening bottles with the edge of a table, a lighter, a ring or another bottle, but it’s always nice to actually have some sweet looking devices that are specifically made for popping the top on my favorite craft beer.

I had seen some examples of bottle openers made out of a piece of wood that uses either a nail or a screw as a the opener and I always liked these. They are used as a lever, applying force in the opposite direction from the standard bottle opener, which actually leads to a more “proper” manner of prying a crown off of a bottle. And if you are a bottle cap collector, this version of an opener won’t bend the crown.

You will need some tools for this crafty project, but it’s good to own tools, so here is an excuse to buy a few.

Summer Camp Crafts with our Bruers: Jessica's Beer T-shirt Modifications

Working in the beer industry has a few perks. Besides all the free beer and cool people there are lots of t-shirts (at least to me this is a bonus). What better way to support your favorite brewery than by wearing their merch? However I generally do not like to represent my local brewery with just a simple t-shirt.

By applying some DIY (do-it-yourself) techniques, I have modified many of my favorite brewery t-shirts.