This is the first in a holiday series detailing homemade gifts to make for friends and family. Homemade Holidays will run every Thursday in the features section. Find inspiration and share your how-to gift ideas at lehighvalleylive.com/entertainment keyword: homemade holidays.

My loved ones were supposed to get homemade quilted wall hangings as Christmas gifts. I envisioned holiday fabric encircling a smiling St. Nick with buttons for eyes, and a fluffy white beard.

Yeah, right. Have I mentioned I’m a beginning quilter?

I sat down the first night, poured a glass of wine and set to work. Let’s just say I still have all my fingers, but I abandoned the wall hanging idea.

The next morning I had a new plan: free-standing Christmas tree ornaments to hang on your door. I envisioned them to be about 4 feet by 3 feet. Apparently, I’m a dreamer who doesn’t know her buttonhole stitch from a straight stitch. Another night, another failed project. Drat.

I went from wall hangings to door decorations to pillows, then Christmas ornaments and finally pathetic coasters, downsizing with every project. And you know what I had left by the end of it? Empty bottles of wine and a mess of wasted fabric. I seriously considered quilted finger puppets, but thought better of it.

Enter Plan B.

Have you ever stopped to consider the ingenuity of a cork? Hey, no wisecracks. I was desperate, OK? (And I’m hoping my loved ones forget to read the paper today).

Corks are good for more than just stopping up a bottle. A cousin of mine made cork trivets a few years back after a particularly good trip to Paris.

Sadly, no trip to Paris, but a few trips to local wineries or homebrew stores and you can have a stash of your own. See the ingredients box for a list of supplies before you get started.

Process

INGREDIENTS:

Picture frame

Hot glue gun and glue sticks

C

OLD CORKS:

-

Save your own and ask family and friends to do the same.

-Or ask your favorite local winery if they’ll sell you their used corks.

NEW CORKS:

Wunderler’s Market,

Wunderler’s sells 15 different kinds of corks as individual pieces or by the bag. The individual corks start at 19 cents a piece, while bags of tapered corks run 12 to 15 cents per piece.

Keystone Homebrew Supply

Corks will cost roughly $1 per cork, and are sold in bags of 30 or 100. Order a few days in advance for the non-wax varieties — they’re not normally carried — so the store can get them in from their Montgomeryville location.

Washington One Stop Ace Hardware,

Corks are sold individually or by the bag. Corks range by size, about 8 to 10 varieties, and are located in the hardware department. Prices range from 10 cents to $3.

Vintner’s Circle, 1700 Sullivan Trail, Forks Township; 610-438-8660,

Bags of 30 natural corks sell for $4.49, larger quantities are available.

Remove the glass and paper inserts from the picture frame. Leave the backing in, so that the wall hanging doodads are still intact.

Arrange corks inside the edges before gluing. In reality this project shouldn’t take too long. But I got carried away making a pattern and stopping to make sure that two of the Charles Shaw (I heart Trader Joe’s) corks didn’t show up next to each other.

You can mix up colors, textures and designs. The only problem I ran into was that the wax corks I used were about half the size of the natural corks. I used a mix of new and old corks. As you might expect, the used corks were slightly smaller than the new ones.

Once you have your design, plug in the hot glue gun. Don’t skimp on the glue with these. You don’t want to give someone a gift where the corks keep popping off. To make sure I kept my design in the same order, I removed one row at a time and laid them above the row I was working on.

Note: The wax corks need a little extra glue, because they're not as porous as the regular ones

.

Once all your corks have been glued down, run your hands across the board to make sure that each cork fits snugly and doesn’t roll. Allow to dry flat.

Gift-giving ideas



You can take this one of three ways. First, go for a culinary theme and package your trivet with a festive cooking platter or dish, and some wooden cooking utensils. Or for the wine lover, pair your cork trivet with a good bottle of wine and accessories. If you’re going the corkboard route, pick up decorative pushpins and fun desk accessories.

You can have fun with the wine corks too. Gift a corkboard to your significant other of corks from bottles you enjoyed on your vacations, and decked out with postcards from the trip. You’ll never again say “Honey, what was the name of that really good Douro red we had in Portugal?” Just look at the board.

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SKILL LEVEL:

If you can operate a hot glue gun, you’ve pretty much got this one in the bag.