Wine Cork Board- Another Project Completed!

For the past year I have been saving up corks to finish this wine cork bulletin board. It is about four hundred corks, and even if you are a lush- it is still A LOT of drinking. I had my parents help out, so whenever I visited them they had a plastic bag full of corks for me to take home. Adam and I took a wine class and the teacher sent me home with a large bag of corks. Pretty soon I had a ton of corks lying around the apartment, taking up space, and an unfinished board that I was too busy to finish. Shocker. The story of my life. So one day I thought, I have to get rid of these corks! I pulled out the unfinished board and just motored through it. I find that once I start up a project again, it re inspires me and is so much easier to complete. The most difficult step is taking it out of the closet (or other dark hole) I've stuck it in. Well I began going through corks and it was very easy to finish the second half and I was SSSOOOO proud of myself when it was done. It is now hanging by my front door and I love looking at it every time I open or close my door. It is really great to try to remember where all the corks are from. The Nickel & Nickel cork (towards the middle) is from our 5th year anniversary dinner in Big Sur.

If you are feeling green and would like to recycle your corks, it is super easy. What I did was go to an art supply store and bought a simple wooden frame (remember, the larger the frame the more corks you need, and the longer it takes to finish). Make sure the frame is about 1.25" deep so that it can hold the corks. Once I had the frame I cut out a piece of foam core that fit into the frame exactly. In order to make sure the corks fit, I placed the foam core into the frame and then fit the corks in from there. You can do lots of different designs- mine is fairly straightforward, but it is like a puzzle, I would piece in about eight corks and then glue them onto the foam core. I did row by row, width wise. I used tacky glue- I went to a craft store and asked the salesperson what would work best (any strong craft glue will work). When I had pieced together a good amount, I would pick up the corks and just put a line of glue on the bottom and then press it down, hold it for a moment and move on to the next one. The only difficult part was the end of the rows. Sometimes a cork wouldn't fit into the last space, so I would just cut it up with a knife to a size that would fit. (Special note: I didn't use any plastic corks). Once all the corks were glued in place (about a year after starting the project), I turned over the form core and placed it in the frame corks first. Voila- after hammering a couple of framing tacks to keep it in place, I wired it and hung it up on the wall and now have a beautiful self-made showpiece!