Creative Things to Do With Wine Corks

Your empty bottles of wine became victims of the latest house clearance, but for, you are still keeping the corks. They are undamaged, whole, and extremely enticing, and for some reason you can’t bring yourself to leave them for junk disposal. You feel like they might come in handy someday, but that is not really the case. What you are feeling at that moment is your imagination running wild. Why add them for the waste removal heap when you can do so much with them. Your mind is already telling you what you should do, so use your creativity and make use of the hundreds of corks lying around instead of throwing them away. Here are some suggestions, if you need to stir your imagination a bit more.

• Journal Corks

The very least you can do is get a big bowl and a marker and every time something memorable happens in your life, you can write it down on a cork and throw it in the bowl. That does sound like measuring your life in cork-worth, but at least you will be keeping track of memorable days.

• Cork Magnets

Cut a cork in half, add a small magnet on the flat end, and voila! Now you have a magnet for your fridge. You can draw on the corks to bring out a variety of images, or you can use the corks to make shapes. It is an activity that gives you further activities.

• Cork Knobs

You can add a knob, or replace an old one with a cork. Just take a screw that is long enough for the job, drive it through the place where you want the knob and then through the cork, and you are done – you now have your custom-made knobs to enjoy and fiddle with.

• Corkboard

And why put the rubbish removal on the perfectly useful corks when you can make them both useful and cool-looking? Take a standard board, take a bunch of corks, cut them vertically in half and glue or nail them flat-side down on the board. Now hang it on the wall and you have your own cool corkboard to pin notes and bulletins on.

• Cork Bathmat

If you abhor that old, scraggly rug you use as a bathmat and wanted to replace it ever since you first saw it, then now is the chance to do it for free. Actually, not replace it – better it! Cut the corks in half and sew them flat side-down on the math to create a perfectly viable cork bathmat which you can decorate to suit your tastes.

• Cork Coasters or Trivets

Both are incredibly easy to make. For a coaster, again you have to cut a cork in half, either vertically or horizontally, and glue the bits together. For the trivet, you simply have to glue corks of the same size together until you have a circular trivet to place your teapot on. That was simple, right?

• Cork Card Holder

This can be easily done in one of two ways. Either cut a cork horizontally in half, make a slice at the top and there you go, or cut it vertically along its length, place it flat-side down and make a slice on the other side to slide a card in.

• Cork Stamp

Now here is where you can get real creative and have lots of fun. Get a sharpie, a craft knife and a cork. Draw the shape you want to stamp with the sharpie, then cut around it with the knife, and there you have the stamp. Dip in ink of any colour and apply – it is as simple as that.

Don’t be so quick to discard corks in the waste removal heap. They can be quite useful and fun to figure out, and once you do, you will enjoy them even more when you put your creativity at work and start creating things. Definitely much more enjoyable than rubbish removal, right?