As promised, here is my refreshed mantel. It gets moved around a little every couple of days as I think of different arrangements to try. But hidden here are a few of my latest projects.
For these projects, I tried to minimize the additional supplies I would need to purchase and mostly tried to find things around the house to use. I think the most that I spent on the three projects combined was probably roughly $20.
I am going to work backwards a little bit and start with the most recent: the burst of wine corks. Now, I have to admit, I haven't quite completed it yet. In my china cabinet is a vase that holds all of the wine corks that have been popped in our house. It looked like a lot to me, but it turns out it wasn't quite enough. I will have to slowly add to it as our collection is regrown.
For this project, you will need a hot glue gun, a fairly sharp knife, a 2 1/2 inch Styrofoam ball, and based on my progress so far roughly 60-70 wine corks.
To start the base, simply glue the corks to the ball as close together as possible. I quickly found that because of the angles that were created as I glued the corks around the edges of the ball, there were large gaps that would need to be filled in. This is where the knife comes in.
You will need to cut angles into some of the corks in order to get them to fit in between the base layer. For me, every cut was different - I tried to stagger the heights a little just to give it more texture.
It seemed to work best to do small sections at a time. I just did little patches of the base, filled it in, then moved on to the next section. I tried to make each section look original by mixing up the brands, using various heights and alternating between which end of the cork was sticking out. I also threw in a couple of champagne corks for fun.
Here is a close up of what mine looks like at this point:
If anyone comes up with any twists on this - I would love for you to share!!
lovely...
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