Wine Cork Letters

My latest craft project was Wine Cork Letters. I got the idea from Etsy. With all the extra corks I had from the Black Board project, I though I would make something personal to put over the bar. The Wine Cork letters are another very easy project. Each of the letters, after they were cut, only took me about a hour and a half to put together. The final product looks like this...

I choose the "C" and the "J" because they are my husbands and my first initials. The first step in the project is to find print out letters to trace onto a wood board. First, I tried to take letters from word and just in-large them so it would be the size of a sheet paper, but that didn't work. What did work was to search pictures of letters from Google. Then save the letters that you like, and crop the picture so that it is just the letter. That way I could make the picture of the letter the size of the paper. From there I traced the letters onto a piece of scrap wood that my husband and laying around at work.  He was nice enough to take them into work, and cut the letters out for me. After cutting the letters it was time to get to work.

 I stated on the "C" first since that is my letter. I wanted the letters to look a little more artistry the just corks lined up. First I took all the corks that we used as "test" corks for the last project and started to glue them down. They were all cut in odd shapes because we were still trying to figure out the best way to cut the corks in half. I also took the corks that had fun saying or cute pictures on them and cut them into smaller pieces just to say the saying or picture. I wanted to make sure I had different sizes and shapes to give the letters texture.

To glue the corks down I used wood glue that drys clear so if there was a little extra you wouldn't be able to tell. I put the bigger pieces of cork down first and filled in the space with smaller corks. It just took a good eye trying to fit the cork into the right spot. When I cut the cork I tried to cut it into odd shapes. This is to give both letter texture when they are up on the wall. I didn't want the letter to look flat, like on some of the Etsy letters that are for sale.  

There you have it. A quick easy project to use some of your wine corks and to make your house just a little more personalty. Have fun crafting, and again if you have any questions just let me know.

Wine Cork Black Board

I have pinned many ideas on Pinterest and I have finally had the time to start to create them! The first big item that I wanted to recreate with my own twist is called the Wine Cork Artwork from The V Spot Blog. My twist on it was going to be making the Artwork part of the project a back board so I could hang it over my bar and put quotes on it, or when we have a party put the drinks on it.

This was a multi-day project and took some help from my wonderful husband who did all the cutting for me. This is because we live in a small condo and with no place to do wood work.

The first thing that I had to do was find a frame for the project. It was luck that I am a little clumsy and broke the glass in one of the frames that we had laying around the house. We measure it and went to Lowe's to get a piece of board that would fit the frame. We ended up with a 2'x4' piece of oak. I would have loved to get a piece of Masonite, unfortunately they were all out. If I would change anything about this project it would be to use a Masonite board. The first thing that you have to do is to put a base coat on the piece of wood that you are turning into the black board. If the board has any ruff spots on it you need to sand those out. The best black board is a smooth one. After you let your base coat dry you are ready to put on your blackboard paint.

You will have to put on at least 3 coats of black board paint to make sure that none of your base coat is showing through. I was lucky, the day that I choose that I choose to paint the weather was perfect. It wasn't to hot and the humidity was low. I kept my sliding glass door open and let the breeze dry the paint for me. On the can it said that you should wait 24 hours between each coat of paint. When you go online there are multiple websites that say wait until the coat before it drys. That is how I did it. I did wait 24 hours, after I was done painting 3 coats of black board paint on, before I tested to make sure that everything worked.

Next step was cutting all of the corks in half. Now my husband and I tried many different methods on doing this... a sharp knife, a small hack saw, and we even tried to make a jig, BUT none of them worked. The only way, in my opinion, to cut wine corks in half is to use a sharp razor blade. You cut one side first, and then the other. We choose to cut all the corks in half so they would lay flat. It also helps so you only need half the corks. I am guessing another question you might have is how did we get all these corks? The answer to that is a little drinking but mostly when we go to wineries and out to eat I asked what they did with all the corks and if I could have them. That is how we got most of the corks. While my husband was cutting corks in half I put them all down to make sure that the design worked.

After the corks were all in place it was time to glue! Again after doing a little research online I found that most people had great success with plain old wood glue. I headed over to to Harbor Freight to get some glue. It wouldn't come out of the bottle so we ended up putting the glue into a small bowl and using a q-tip to spread it onto the corks. I think this works a little better because you need a TON of glue to get the cork to stick.

After gluing all the corks down we put a piece of wood down over all of the corks and put all of my text books on top to weigh it down. After 2 hours of  letting it dry we checked all the corks to make sure that none of them were coming up. Since I am a really impatient person I spent the rest of the night looking up a good quote about drinking. I ending up finding a quote from Ben Franklin. "In wine there is Wisdom, In beer there is Freedom, and in water there is Bacteria."

There you have it the Wine Cork Black Board! I hope that this has helped you. If you have any questions on how I did this please leave a comment. Have fun crafting!