When Lindsey Glass and her husband took their three children to Telluride, Col. this July for a month-long vacation, the artist was so taken by the landscape and the experience that she was compelled to capture it by painting a portrait of the family, amidst mountains, flowers and animals, on a bottle of Woodford Reserve bourbon. May sound like a strange way to commemorate a memory, but painting liquor bottles, particularly champagne, has been a growing trend for the past few years, one that Glass has recently turned into a business offering custom hand-painted Champagne bottles – among others- to celebrate life’s special moments.

The owner of Lindsey Glass Creative began experimenting with bottle painting in February when she decided to gift her sister a painted Champagne bottle to celebrate her graduation in May. “I’d seen them online and they were expensive. I knew I could paint one, but when it came time to do it, I stared at that bottle for three weeks before starting,” recalls Glass who has gone on to embellish bottles for family, friends and a few of her husband’s employees.

Glass’s love of art began as a child with a flair for interior design. “I was always moving the furniture around the living room, kitchen and bedrooms in the house I grew up in,” says the Sunset native. “Later in high school, my art teacher, Miss Knott, was the first to encourage me to go into some kind of art. She’d have us submit a charcoal drawing of our choice every week, and that gave me such a feeling of freedom. I also had a class in architecture that deepened my interest in design and art. But I was interested in the business side as well, so I majored in accounting thinking that once I had that background, I’d start my own design business.”

After working in public accounting for eight years, Glass says she knew she wanted to do something creative. Then came two children, and she began working as the bookkeeper for her husband’s property management company. While that gave her the opportunity to also design the interior of a few homes, she recalls, “I still wanted to be creative so bad – I had that itch in me.”

Since posting on Instagram in June, Glass has helped others celebrate special occasions from engagements, anniversaries and birthdays to births and retirements. Among her favorites is a bottle that reads “She said yes,” celebrating an engagement on a Destin beach. The pastel Tiffany blue bottle features the couple’s crest and seashells above the label and their dog on the backside. “I can get carried away sometimes – I love to do this,” says the self-described perfectionist.

Glass collaborates with each client from the beginning to incorporate their vision into the final product. Though she asks for pictures and quizzes them on what visuals they have in mind, in most cases they leave it to her to channel their idea into a memorable bottle. “Once my sketches are approved and I have the sizes right, I’ll make stencils to put on the bottle exactly where I want them to go,” she explains. From a spare room in her Lafayette home, which doubles as a payroll office, Glass begins by brushing a base coat of acrylic glass paint onto the bottle, which she says is the most time-consuming step. “Because I’m painting on glass, I have to wait four hours between coats; it takes 24 hours for everything to completely dry.” In painting the details that personalize the bottle, she uses the tiniest of brush tips, pointing out that paint pens aren’t thin enough. She touches up any imperfections or feathering at the bottom of the bottle with rubbing alcohol, then finishes with a coat of an all-purpose sealer to maintain the color. The whole process takes about four days. Price ranges include one of five bottles offered: Veuve Clicquot, brut or rosé, LaMarca, Woodford Reserve bourbon or Casamigos tequila. Customers can also provide their own bottle of spirits.

While the bottles are purchased as a keepsake, Glass advises that they not be refrigerated, which causes them to sweat and the paint likely to bubble. “I tell customers that if they want to toast with chilled liquor, they should pour it into a carafe and refrigerate it or use ice.”

For the time being, Glass does not have the licensing to ship alcohol, so orders are picked up. Instead of that limiting her business she says, “It made me think of something else that I could paint, that’s different, without alcohol. I came up with the idea of acrylic trays because they’re both artistic and useful.” Although new in the making, the 10” x 10” and 15” x 15” trays have shown to be a canvas for floral designs and Christmas images – even a sports car. (Move over coffee table book.)

In November Glass finished her first big project creating painted bottles at the request of a realty company in Orange Beach, Ala. Last month she began working on a bridal-themed bubbly prompting her to add, “I’d love to be involved in more weddings and work with wedding planners to have my bottles part of a wedding suite.”

In the meantime, the mother, bookkeeper and artist says she’s having fun coming up with designs of her own while developing a signature style. “I’ve always had the itch to be creative, and I never knew what that would be. This is something for me – something I can be proud of.”