Show off your corks!

So on this wining adventure I've become a bit of a collector. I have this china cabinet filled with the wine glasses we have collected, one from each winery we visit (that has a logo glass. Some are so new or small that they haven't invested in the logo glasses yet).

 

And I have been collecting corks. Any bottle that we open and drink, I put the cork into the dish and save it. Some of them are from wineries around here, others are from gifts, and still others are from grocery store wines. Recently, I realized how many corks I had when I put them away to make room for Christmas decorations..

So I decided to make a cork board. After scouring the internet, I found that I basically had two options: frame or no frame. The framed version seems to be most popular - buy or reuse a picture frame or mirror and fill with corks. I liked the unframed version better - less formal and a little more relaxed.

I chose to use cardboard for the backing. My design is square. It's a 13x13 square and I used a cardboard box that I cut apart to make the background.

Next I laid out all the corks to start to make a pattern. I knew I had a ton of corks from a few of our favorite wineries and I needed to figure out how to spread them out. I had a bunch of synthetic corks, which have a very different texture than natural, so I needed to space them out.

After I decided on my pattern, I cleared them off and started hot-gluing them onto the cardboard. I started at one end and worked up..

It went faster than I anticipated. I put a row of glue, and placed the cork carefully on the board. I chose to make the words and designs on the corks all facing the same direction. I found that if I wiggled the cork a bit on the glue as I pressed it down, it stuck better.

Most of the corks are exactly the same size, but there are some that are shorter. I cut one of my Rappahannock corks into small slices to fill in those spaces.

It's very neat to see how the corks make a pattern, how I can pick out the wine bottles that we enjoyed here and there. And it is wonderful to see how the places we spend the most time have the most corks on the boards - Quattro Goombas and Rappahannock Cellars and Leaves of Grass.

 

 

 

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