Upcycle Living

Until we started buying screw top wine, I had been painstakingly saving up all the wine corks: cleaning, drying and storing. Thanks to my inexplainable sentiment towards the little brown thing and the thought that one day I would be able to use them for something, I've filled up a whole large shoe box. And they had been in there for 7 long years! Just when I was about to give up and decide to clean them out, I caught a glimpse of a trivet made of wine corks in the background of a TV show. Obviously this is not an original idea and surely there must be others who've already done so, but hey I managed to use up all the corks and turned them into something useful - that's good enough for me. With the help of some Selleys adhesive, I made quite a few trivets and 1 pin cushion. Most importantly: I get to keep them, not bin them ;)

I have a bizarre sentiment for cork, especially wine bottle corks. Not the nasty plastic ones, but the real soft corks. Hence the collection of corks in our spare room. I have been thinking about how to make good use of them for the longest time, but nothing came up until recently - when I'm packing for a move. I was trying to flat pack our Ikea side tables, but when I unscrewed the legs, these long and dangerously pointy screws were left sticking out. Then I thought of our collection of wine bottle corks: Simply twist and screw it onto the sticking out screw. The sharp pointy screws are now well wrapped up and no one would get hurt. Hoarding on the old corks did pay out eventually. The rest of our wine cork collection was made into  trivets  :)