I don't think hoarding is really in my nature, but when it comes to wine corks, I just can't throw them away. They are an endangered species. I have hundreds of them; okay, it's more like thousands. An old boss of mine gave me at least a thousand that are in a box collecting dust in the garage. (Not that we haven't contributed another several hundred.)
Occasionally, I ponder what sort of art sculpture or crafty project I could make with them, but I have never taken to any of the cork boards or trivets seen so frequently at craft shows and the like.
These little cylindrical pieces of plant matter are so comforting to roll in your fingers, they represent history. I like to look over the corks and remember the different wines we drank, the special occasions, the distinct, special evenings.
Now I am finding new ways to display them that are attracting as well. Maybe, someday, I will make a trivet. A restaurant we like in downtown Tacoma, Ravenous, has you sign the cork from the bottle you drink and then they attach them to the wall as a sort of wainscoting! Very clever, but I can safely say, we are not drinking that much! For now, I like them baskets and cages. Especially the antique egg basket, it will always get a remark at a dinner party.
I can tell that our styles are different, but I have the same cork hoarding instincts. I swear we'll come up with a killer project for all those corks some day. But in the meantime, I have some of them on display in my tall clear glass vase. It works great until I need the vase for flowers, like I did last week when my friend gave me some lovely tall sunflowers! At that point, I just dumped all the corks in a drawer. I can't wait to clean up after that decision.
ReplyDeleteI used to keep all the corks and give them to my sister-in-law who is an art teacher at a grade school in Minneapolis. I'm not sure what she did with them (probably made cork boards), but for some reason I've been hoarding them for the last year too. Let's come up with some project to use them on!
ReplyDeleteI talked to Mark last year at Pour at Four and they have been saving all of their corks (so that's a lot of corks!) and we talked about me making some sort of sculpture out of them during the Proctor arts Fest and they would "sponsor" it or whatever. Maybe we should talk to them again and make a big arch or some other thing to display.
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