Is there anything better than crafting with things you already have lying around the house? Maybe, but not much, and recently one of the most popular common household craft materials is wine bottles, corks, and labels.
Even if you’re not normally crafty, you can still add some nice decorative flair to your home with one of these four projects.
1. Vases and colored glass accents
Starting with the simplest first, you can reuse your wine bottles as vases, or simply colored accents. Try putting the bottle near a window, or other area with a lot of natural light, to bring out the full beauty of the glass.
Removing the label will also help enhance the decorative quality of the bottle (and give you a useful crafting item you can use later). You can remove most labels with “the oven trick.” Simply place a cork-less bottle into the oven and set it to 350. Allow the bottle to become hot, which usually takes ten minutes or so. Being extremely careful remove the bottle from the oven and peel off the label.
The oven trick will work for the majority of labels. If it doesn’t you can always resort to hot water and a scrub brush.
2. Wine Label Collage Art
If you don’t have a lot of art to go on your walls, and don’t have the time, money, or inclination to go buy any, don’t worry! You can still make a great wall hanging with wine labels and canvas.
All you need are: an artist’s canvas (a crafts store such as Michael’s will have these in a wide variety of sizes), a lot of wine labels (depending on the size of your canvas), and mod podge (an all-in-one glue, sealer and finish).
The hardest part of this project is acquiring all the labels. Unless you drink like a fiend, it’ll probably be best to have friends and family save their wine bottles for you. When you have your labels, simply mod podge them to the canvass.
3. Wine Cork Coasters
For this fun yet classy craft, start with at least 25 wine corks, thin cork paper circles (look for these in crafts stores), a hot glue gun (with glue), a pocket knife, cutting board, and sand paper.
Cut the wine corks in half vertically and glue them to the cork paper circles. Use your pocket knife to cut around the edges of the circles, sand the bumpy part of the wine cork down, and ta-da – classy wine cork coasters.
4. Magnetic Wine Cork Planters
For the truly crafty out there, try this: carefully hollow out a wine cork halfway using a paring knife and puncher. Then glue a magnet to the cork, add a tiny amount of potting soil to the hole and insert a small succulent clipping. Water with an eye dropper.
These charming magnets make excellent hostess gifts or stocking stuffers (just wrap carefully!).
As you can see, there are a lot of great things you can do with wine crafts. So, what are you waiting for? Get drinking…ahem, I mean crafting.
