The return of the shot glasses

I was going to put up a garden update, but there really isn’t anything new to report this week. We have harvested a couple summer squash, which Sage reports are very tasty. Peppers and tomatoes are getting bigger, but nothing there ready to pick yet.

So instead, I thought I’d bring back an old feature – Shot Glass of the Month. Or Shot Glass of Whenever I get around to it, as it's been. The reason I’m bringing it back is that I have finally unpacked all my shot glasses in the new house – pretty much the last thing we needed to unpack. They’ve been packed away for over a year, since we moved from NC. Since we’ve moved in it only made sense to set up my shelves in our basement. We have a kitchen/bar area down there, and it’s starting to turn into a really comfortable, relaxed lounge area, so the shot glasses will fit right in. Unfortunately it’s also a very small area, and there isn’t a whole lot of wall space for the shelves to go up. (I’m up over 530 shots by now, so it requires a bit of room.) I decided to put my shelves along the one long wall that we have open, that’s opposite the kitchen and leads up to where our projection screen is at. My shelves in NC that I built (see photos here) are 36” long, but the wall wasn’t long enough for 3 to fit on that wall. After some measuring and planning, I realized that if I cut them down to 32” each, I could space them out perfectly on the wall so that not only could 3 shelves fit side-by-side, but the brackets would be perfectly placed 16” apart, and I could screw them into the studs on the wall. (In NC I was only able to hit a few studs with my shelves, and had to use drywall anchors for the rest. Not the best solution when holding up glassware.) So I cut 4 inches off each shelf, moved around the brackets, and voila – shot glass shelf heaven.

However, even with my setup of 9 shelves, each 32” in length, and each with 3 levels of shots, I still wasn’t going to have enough room for all my shot glasses. Thankfully I had one other wall in the basement that fit my 4 other pre-made shelves well enough. So after a day of measuring, leveling, drilling and screwing (hey now!), I got them all up in place. Next step – unpacking the glasses and putting them up! Sounds easy, right? Well, it is, but also time consuming. First, I had to make sure everything made it through in one piece. I’m sorry to say I did have one casualty – a small shot that got chipped and lost a small section. But it’s still 90% complete, and is still “showable”. But the biggest pain when unpacking is organizing the shots on the shelves. I try to put them all together by “category”, if you will. Meaning: Sports; Colleges; Attractions; Countries/Cities/States; etc. Unfortunately that doesn’t always work out. Sometimes I just have more shots than will fit in a certain section. Other times some of the sizes won’t fit in the sections I have for them. But for the most part it has to do with space and area, and trying to get dozens of different shapes/sizes in the same place. Mostly it worked, but I still have a lot of shots spread out when I’d like them to be all together. But, what can you do.

So here are the shelves, filled up and ready for more.

The main set of shelves. There's about 345 glasses pictured here.

My "other" shot glass shelves, which has about 185 right now.

I calculated that I have room for approximately 70 more shot glasses based on the shelving I have in place. When I realized that would bring me right up to 600, I thought that might be a good place to stop. But then Sage mentioned how I could easily build another row of shelves under the current ones, and that’ll be big enough for 135 more shots…so we’ll see if it ever ends.

And now that they’re all up and for everyone to see, why not highlight another shot glass. This week, it’s my Uruguay shot glass.

It's supposed to be this crooked.

This shot glass, from Uruguay obviously, was a gift from my friend Heather, the same person who bought that great Princess Diana shot glass I've highlighted before. She was traveling to Uruguay with her parents when she found this. I believe that it's made out of a hollowed out tusk of some sort, and it's screwed on to the base very loosely. It also smells horribly, a smell that has never really gone away in the 4+ years I've had it. I've always had a faint suspicion that it's actually some sort of banned animal material, but I try not to think about it too much. It's incredibly unique, and I'd hate to have to start feeling guilty for showcasing something that contains something like banned ivory.