GETTING INTO THE GAME

Building ships in a bottle is a rewarding process, but with few opportunities to hide mistakes from scrutinizing gazes, it requires a high degree of research, planning, patience and attention to detail. The concern for quality must be present from the first cut to the final touches, such as whipping the line around the bottleneck and sealing the cork in place. On the upside, there is little waste, most tools and materials are cheap, and the craft requires little more space than a good-sized and well-lit workbench or desk. Basic instructions can be found on YouTube, on various Wiki sites and with a bit more detail on madehow.com.

If reading how-to books is more your thing, here are a couple of options: Ships in Bottles, A Step-by-Step Guide to a Venerable Nautical Craft by Donald Hubbard, Ships in Bottles by Guy DeMarco, Modelling Ships in Bottles by Jack Needham, and two by Capt. Daniel Berg: Build a Ship in a Bottle and

Shipwreck in a Bottle. Other sources of information include any one of the several vibrant communities of hobby builders that exist in the U.S., Europe and Japan, all with associations that publish newsletters and arrange competitions and exhibits.

If building from scratch isn’t your thing, there are kits of prefabricated vessels from Modelers Central ($125), and lower-end merchandise on Amazon. If building or assembling is not (yet) an option, online vendors happily sell finished bottle ships. Those vendors include Ships in Bottles in Georgia, the U.S. distributor for German manufacturer Buddelschiff Bini, which offers customized products with your choice of flag, logo and ship’s name. The products run the gamut from cheap and corny to “museum quality.”