Yep — you read that right, I just made a Christmas ornament in June.  While that shouldn’t be too surprising if you know me, this wasn’t as out of season as it may seem.  Backstory: When we were growing up, Mom started collecting Christmas ornaments from all the places we visited, so our Christmas tree turned into a tree of travel memories.  I decided I wanted to do something similar with our tree, and already have a few ornaments from Maine, etc.  Cue the Napa trip a few weeks ago…

Pegs got her Napa Christmas ornament when we were strolling through downtown Napa, but I didn’t find one that really spoke to me.  I have a thing about collecting wine corks, and I collected some from the various bottles we drank outside of our wine tastings, so I decided to use the wine corks to make an ornament to be my keepsake from Napa for our tree!

Bunch o’ Grapes Wine Cork Ornament

What you’ll need:

• Wine corks (~9)
• Leaves
• Twine
• Hot glue gun

I saw a few cool ways to make ornaments from wine corks (totally making these wine cork balls another time), but settled on making them look like a bunch of grapes, mainly because of the number of corks I had to work with.

Start by gluing the corks together to make the bunch of grapes.  Since all my corks had the purple-y stain from the red wine on one end, I decided to use that end as the front.  I also made sure that the winery names were showing on the side of the ornament when possible — the whole point of using real corks form the trip, and not random ones from a Tuesday night.

Cork by cork, I slowly glued them together into a shape similar to grapes on a vine.  Then I glued 2 leaves on top to really get the grape-y feel in case my grape shape wasn’t convincing.

Note: I ended up replacing the real leaves with some fake ones I had in my craft closet.  The real ones wilted, as expected, and the fake ones will last forever!

Once the leaves were on, I cut a piece of twine to make a loop, and attached that to the back with hot glue as well.  I wrote “Napa 2015” on a blank cork on the side, so when I’m old with no memory, I’ll remember the trip it was from!

In less than thirty minutes, I was done!  It was an easy craft to finish after my kickball game, and before I went to bed.  After sending a quick picture to Pegs, I cleaned up and got ready for my next craft… that’s water color inspired 🙂

Now this bad boy is ready for our Christmas tree!  It’s packed away for now, but I’ll bring it back out in a couple of months and add it to the tree..