It was just a matter of time before I made a wine cork wreath considering all of the wine cork crafts I make, as well as all of the wreaths I’ve made.  The process may have been expedited when I was talking about making one of these wreaths with my co-worker Marianne, as well as my aunt Beth within a week.  Well, here you have it!

Wine Cork Wreath

What you’ll need:

• Wine corks!
• Wooden wreath form
• Hot glue gun
• Twine

The thing I like about wine cork crafts is how easy and quick they are to make.  Every craft (except for the wine cork tree) takes a matter of minutes if you have the corks handy, and this was no exception.

The first thing I did was actually not related to wine corks — I tied a piece of twine around the wreath, which will make it easier to hang later without putting too much stress on the corks.

Now to the corks!  Get your wreath form, plug in your hot glue gun, and have lots of corks ready. First, I arranged the corks on the inner part of the wreath form to make sure they fit nicely.

You can tell there’s a little space between a few, but overall they fit great.  Next, glue the corks to the inside of the wreath, one by one.  I applied a line of hot glue to the cork, and made sure that was the piece that attached on the inside of the wreath, as follows:

Then I did the same thing for the outside of the wreath.  Again, for the most part the corks fit and filled the wreath nicely, but you can see a few spaces.

The fun part was then filling in the middle with more rows of corks.  Instead of laying them all out and then gluing them, I just went for it and started gluing.  I glued both rows at the same time (inside cork, then outer cork) to make sure they fit together within the space nicely.

Slowly make your way around the wreath, just gluing away..

Finally, you’ll get to a point where you’re done!  Of course I had a spot where a cork wouldn’t fit, so I ended up putting one in sideways to solve that problem.

After looking at it, the sideways cork bothered the OCD tendencies in me, so I had to fix it.  I removed the cork, cut it in half, then glued the 2 halves into the wreath in the same direction as the others.

Much better!  The wreath looked too plain to hang like that, but I couldn’t decide what else to do to it..

Full transparency: I made this wreath in November, but wasn’t ready to take down my cotton boll wreath yet, so it ended up sitting on the floor in our office for a few months.  When I was ready to switch them out, I had to decide what else to add to it.

After pulling the wreath back out and looking at it on our table, I decided I wanted to add “Cheers” to it (seemed appropriate considering the wreath is made of corks).  I looked at the craft stores to see if they had any wooden letters with cheers already done that I could just paint, but alas, no.  I grabbed the last small canvas I had (~4″ x 8″) and decided to paint a sign instead.

In an effort to use the Cricut, I decided to cut out a ‘cheers’ stencil on card stock to use when painting.  I cut it out, taped it to the canvas, then painted around the letters until I was happy.  I ended up using blue spray paint, then splattering silver and light blue acrylic paint on top.

I removed the stencil, touched up the letters with a white paint pen, and hot glued some twine to the back so the sign could hang.  Cheers sign, done!

Finally, I hung the wreath and the sign on the door.  I was worried the sign would blend into our black front door, but it still contrasts nicely.

And how nice does it look with our new front light?  We had been planning on replacing the faded plastic lights by the front and back doors, and Hunter surprised me with new lights last weekend!  Seriously, it’s the small things like lights, new numbers on your door, a coat of paint, and a cute wreath to freshen up the front of your house!

Now what can I make with the wine corks Laney just brought me…?

Update: A few corks have fallen off after either being in the heat or hanging, so I ended up reattaching them with liquid cement, Goo.  This seems to have done the trick and is a stronger hold!