Wine Cork Projects

jamiejlanier
Dec 3, 2015
4 min read

I love my wine! I mean what 30 something year old woman with kids and a husband and laundry doesn't. I save my corks like a lot of crafters and wine drinkers but I make jewelry out of mine. Wine cork necklaces with little charms are really popular at my jewelry shows. I just couldn't drink fast enough to keep up though so my friend at the Liquor Control Board hooked me up with about 400 wine and champagne corks. Some new, some used but all of them awesome!

What is a girl to do with so many fabulous corks? Search Pinterest of course. So here are the projects I came up with. The first one is a wine cork trivet of sorts. My mom has a tendency to see things in the thrift store or at yard sales and think that I might want to do this or that with it. So she picks them up and gives them to me and then they sit in my craft room for 6 months to a year until one day I either do the d&*% project or I give the item away. This rustic square of decorative wood had a little recess in the middle which was perfect for gluing some wine corks.

I will tell you that I rarely if ever use hot glue. The only time I use hot glue is when my husband drops off yet another game controller that my boys have pulled the cords out of and he needs me hot glue them back to the little computer board inside. And even then it never holds very long. My glue of choice? E6000! Best. S*&$. EVER! It's not as convenient to apply as hot glue but I use quite a few toothpicks to help me with the application and spreading around.

This is how my repurposed wood frame wine cork trivet thingy turned out. I had to cut a few wine corks to fill in the space but I'm pretty pleased otherwise. Hot glue couldn't be used for a trivet since the heat would probably loosen the glue back up.

My next project was around Halloween so I decided to do the popular wine cork pumpkins that you see all over Pinterest Land. Let me tell you that the issue with using E6000 and trying to put wine cork pumpkins together is that the E6000 doesn't dry immediately. In fact, it can take 24 hours for it to completely set so when building and gluing your wine cork pumpkin together you may want to break out the hot glue and apply your E6000 then just a dab or two of hot glue to temporarily hold the corks together. Unless you want to glue two corks together then sit there for a few hours and hold them so they don't fall back apart. I have laundry to do and wine to drink so I broke down and used a dab of hot glue.

Create your pumpkin base and work your way up thinking about the shape as you go. Make sure that you put glue on all sides of the cork that will be connected to another cork. Otherwise it ends up unstable. After I got the pumpkin shape together I cut a cork in half for the stem and did my glue trick on the top. I also cut out a couple leaves from felt and found some rustic looking stuff and glued all that business on there. You could leave your wine corks natural and not paint the front of them and they would look great or you can do what I did and applied a little bit of orange acrylic paint. I think they are adorable.

Then I jumped on the Pinterest Land bandwagon and made myself a trio of Christmas Trees. I used the same hot glue/E6000 technique with the trees. Build the trees based on the size you want and make sure you watch that your shape is even. The last thing I did was put a few wine corks on the bottom for the base for them to stand on. I cut some burlap strings and glued them in the spaces between the corks. Then I took some of my moms vintage and modern buttons and glued them randomly in some places on the front for a vintage/rustic/chic look. To finish it off I painted just a few of the wine corks with some green. I love these even more than the pumpkins. They stand on their own and look absolutely adorable on my windowsill.

As a little bonus here is some info on the wine cork necklaces I make. I have both the synthetic and natural wine corks and I use them both in my jewelry but the natural are by far more popular. You will want to pick up a few things from the hardware store before you start. Pick up a few small eye hooks and a few small hardware store washers. Make sure that the head of the eye hook can't go through the middle of the washer. I place a washer on the top of the wine cork then screw an eye hook down through the top in the middle of the washer. Then I flip it over and do the same thing on the other end. I'll pick a few charms and use some jump rings to attach them to the bottom eye hook then I'll put a chain on the top eye hook and your done. They are adorable and you can create any look you want with just a few simple charms from the craft store.