DEAR GAIL: We are avid wine drinkers and also have wine tasting parties at our house. We have a thing about saving the corks, but now have drawers full of them and not sure what to do with them all, plus we’re out of room. Any creative ideas? Dottie M.
DEAR DOTTIE M: Like any collection, you need to get them out of the drawers and closets and display them for you and your guest to enjoy. First, if you are not already doing this, a fun thing is to write on each cork the date and reason or event that you opened the bottle of wine. When vacationing, write the winery you visited and the vintage of wine and one or two words to describe it. For your wine tasting parties, have your guests sign and date the corks with a special added message. Then place a bunch of them in a bowl. It is a nice way to display and share some of your good times and memories.
Along with a bowl, you can also gather up different sizes and shapes of clear glass jars, vases, canisters, or oversized wine glasses or brandy snifters. Group them together with a couple of your favorite bottles of wine and a framed picture on a table easel.
You can also make a cork board. It’s as simple as taking a piece of black foamcore and placing it inside a ready-made frame. Then just hot glue the corks onto the foamcore. You want black or colored foamcore since you will see some of it showing through. Look for interesting push pins of grapes, wine glasses, wine bottles or cork screws.
If you are adventurous, you can cover one accent wall or install them as the backsplash in your kitchen or bar. Place a straight row around the wall and then place two horizontal and then two vertical to creative a basket weave pattern. It will be a wonderful conversation piece.
Not up to covering a wall? How about covering a canvas that will cover the wall? Again paint the canvas black or the cork color and hot glue to your hearts content. Then simply hang and let the comments begin. You can even hang a picture in the center of it and let it act as a backdrop.
Replace your existing wood baseboard with corks. Place a square top molding at the floor, for the corks to sit on, then place one vertical row of corks that you have cut in half, this way they will lay better against the wall, and top off with another piece of rounded molding. You might not want to do your whole house, but it would be fun in your bar, kitchen, family room, dining or guest bath.
Make a side or coffee table with them. This is an excellent way to transform a yard sale or thrift store find. Cover the top with your corks and then place a piece of glass over to get an even flat surface. If you have a display table, add some extra touches of wine labels, cork stoppers, postcards and photographs of you enjoying your favorite bottle of wine.
Corks also work as a floor mat. Make a wood frame and place the corks on painted particle board. Use it as your front door mat. Just don’t use any of your special corks as you’ll probably need to replace it occasional with the dust we have here in the valley.
Of course some ideas that you may have already tried are trivets, wreaths, frames, picture matting, covering a wooden box and Christmas ornaments.
Now if you have about 160,000 corks stored away, I read about a man that built a boat from the corks he had been saving for 30 years and sailed around Portugal in his cork boat. So Dottie, have fun and empty those cork drawers.