Making crafts with items you are re-purposing is a wonderful way to save some money and cut down on waste that might have gone in the trash. One thing you can re-purpose are wine corks. These ideas for six crafts with wine corks are sure to inspire you.

You can compost a natural cork and recycle a plastic cork, so if you aren’t going to craft with them they do not have to end up in a landfill. I also wanted to mention that if you don’t drink wine, you could always ask a friend to save some corks for you. Or like I did, I bought many of these very inexpensively from the ArtScraps Reuse Store in St. Paul, MN.

St. Patrick’s Day Craft with Wine Corks

With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, this would be a fun time to try my first suggestion to make them in to clover prints. The picture belowis one that my preschooler made as a sample project that I will be doing with my children’s classes at school. I just hot glued the corks together before adding a decorative ribbon. You could probably just rubber band them together if you don’t have hot glue. I also plan to read them a couple books from my list of 17 St. Patrick’s Day Accelerated Reader Books.

 Wine cork fix

This has to probably be my favorite idea to re-purpose a cork. In this picture you will notice 2 different spreaders. I bought them from Harry & David years ago, but I dropped one and the hollow porcelain around the base just shattered. I have had the end of this spreader sitting in a drawer since then waiting for an idea in which to turn it back in to a useful spreader again. All I had to do was push the end in through the hole left by the bottle opener.

Since I probably would never have them right next to each other, it doesn’t matter that they look different.

Wine Corks Craft: Make Clay Stampers

I made these clay stampers, but haven’t had a chance to use them. I plan to try them out soon, but just haven’t yet.

What I did here was just to hot glue some buttons with decorative patterns that might create a neat looking pattern when repeated over and over in the clay and add interesting detail to a piece of pottery I will create.

These were all the decorative ones I had to work with, so I made them all up and will soon see just want they look like. You could also make some up to give to kids to use when they are working with play dough.  Just another idea to add to the ones in the post A Thrifty Mom’s Guide to Play Dough.

Craft idea: Turn wine corks into place cards

I thought making these table place cards out of corks would be a fun and thrifty project for Easter this year.

To make these place cards, I let the corks soak in hot water for about 15 minutes before slicing lengthwise. Soaking corks in water will help keep from cracking or splitting when you cut them. I just used a simple glass pebble placed behind the cork to keep it from falling over. These are the same glass pebbles used in my DIY Mosaic Mirror. When I am done using these as place cards I can still re-purpose the corks in to another craft that hides the thin slice. For more Tablescape ideas, check out the post Thrifty Guide to Creating a Tablescape.

Make a wine cork sale boat

This little sailboat idea was a fun project to do with my preschooler. We have made little boat out of re-purposed materials before, but this is probably the smallest one we have made.

I hot glued the 3 corks together and then let him apply some decorative duct tape on the boat and on the sail around a toothpick. The tooth pick inserts very easily in to the cork. Cork floats very nicely, so this could be a thrifty new toy in the bathtub or in the water table outside once we have spring once again.

 Wine Cork Plant Markers

Finally my last project idea is to make some plant markers out of a cut up dowel (you can get a thin piece like this for under $1 at the hardware store and cut it up into several stakes) and some corks.

You just need to push the dowel in through the hole left by the corkscrew and write the plant name on the cork.

For other plant marker ideas, I have made plant markers out of re-purposed juice lids a couple times in past. Once it was Stamped Plant Markers and the other time it was Picture Plant Markers.

These ideas will help you keep wine corks out of the trash and give them new life.  Make sure to pin these ideas on Pinterest the next time you have a few extra wine corks you’re wondering how to use.

Your turn to share: What other ideas do you have to re-purpose wine corks?