10/09/2026
IS IT IN YOU?
I started collecting Gatorade bottles in 2020, with the intention of building a raft. I had no idea how it would work, but I knew I wanted to build it. I worked for a moving company at the time, so I would take cases of Gatorade to work and tell the other guys the drinks were free as long as they returned the bottles to me.
Somewhere along the timeline, I realized the potential within the fact that Gatorade bottles came with two different colour lids. I decided to make a sign instead of a raft, with white for the negative space and orange for the letters. I did some drafting and, though it would be more condensed only using lids, I elected to keep the bottles.
To prevent mold and discoloration, I rinsed and dried every bottle before bagging them. I had these bags of bottles for years, a recycling depot's dream stash sitting around my house. Like the fridge project, I put it off because I'm a perfectionist and couldn't visualize how to achieve the desired effect. Finally, in a moment of desperation for more space, I got to work.
I used pliers and a pin to put four centred holes in every bottle, then I used an awl to widen the holes. At first, I was stringing the bottles together by running fishing line through the straw of a WD-40 can. That method proved tedious, so I started taping the fishing line to the end of a coat hanger and using that method to feed it through the bottles. I strung the bottles together in sets of nine and lined them up on the floor, although I had to eventually move the strings to a table because my cat kept knocking everything over.
I realized halfway through that the project would be too cumbersome in one piece, so I framed it in two pieces, GATO and RADE. I tried to build the frame out of plumber's strapping, but the strapping lacked the tension, so I bought bookshelf runners from Kent.
I've had the completed sign for over a year, but recently my friend Dan helped me load it in the car and get it down to Mispec for a photo shoot!
Somebody get me a job in marketing 😂
