This past winter, I acquired my first pairs of boots as an adult. It’s crazy, I know, but living in Florida my whole life, I just never had any.  As I started to acquire more boots, I began to realize that I needed a way to keep them in shape and upright when stored in my closet.  I looked up boot shapers on several websites, but I was disappointed with how expensive they were, and I was concerned that they were likely to eventually fall apart and end up in a landfill.  Then, I read somewhere about using wine bottles as boot shapers, so I saved up a few, and tried it out.  It works like a charm!  It’s works best with thinner, smaller wine bottles, which are what I usually buy anyhow.  The bottles are easy to take out when you wear the boots, and easy to put back in when you’re done.  Plus, I think it looks pretty cool.  Since wine bottles are glass, they’ll hold together for a long time, and if I feel that I don’t want to use them anymore, I can just recycle them.

One word of caution though: make sure that the wine bottle isn’t wider than your boot shaft, or it may stretch out your boots.  I have found this to be an issue with the ankles of some of my slimmer boots.