Crafty with Corks

As you have probably seen from my wife's posts, she is very creative with wine corks (you can see some past projects here and here).  We have saved them up over the years and she has come up with many interesting things to do with them.  I decided I wanted to give it a shot to see if I could also be as crafty with corks. 

I recently saw you could purchase a kit to make trivets out of wine corks.  This seemed a little ridiculous to me, especially when I saw the price of said kit.  I figured I may as well give it a shot and trying making a cork trivet using only the supplies we had on hand...making it essentially free. 

To start, I played around with the placing of the corks until I found a design that I thought looked nice.

I then glued a couple corks at a time to each other and clamped the corks while the glue dried.

 

*WARNING* Only use a small amount of Gorilla Glue!

Have you ever used Gorilla Glue?  This was my first time.  I have used many adhesives but never Gorilla Glue.  It's pretty great stuff and amazing at adhesion, but like I said, ONLY USE A SMALL AMOUNT.  I ended up with Gorilla Glue all over my hands and I could not get it off for at least a day.  Worst, Gorilla Glue expands as it dries and when used in excess, takes over your cork trivet project.

The glue worked quite well with the corks, however, and they were extremely secure.  Once I had the design completely glued together, I decided it needed some feet to add some additional interest and, well, feet.  I cut 2 wine corks in half lengthwise and used them as a base to raise the trivet slightly.

There we have it - a cork trivet made without a $40 trivet kit!

 - JOHN