Project! Wine Cork Board

The Willi household is quite the wine-drinking abode (understatement of the year). We certainly do enjoy our varietals. And I, being obsessed with having a "thing," thought it would be a brilliant idea to try to keep all our corks starting around when we moved into our place in 2007.

Cut to nearly three years of collecting and we had an uninspired vase full of old corks plus two smaller bowls because of some overflow issues. Exhibit A:

Thankfully, the oh-so-smart merchandisers at Bed, Bath & Beyond sell affordable Wine Enthusiast wine cork boards. We slapped one of those babies on the registry, and low and behold, we got one!

I needed a little something to do while watching World Cup matches, so I opted for finally putting our cork board together. I started with allllll of our corks...

As I was looking through them, I picked out a few that were written on, and was reminded of why this was a good idea for us— it really is a fun way to commemorate events...

birthdays...

law school acceptance...

anniversaries...

corny holidays...

special trips...

...among other things. It was really nice to dig through that pile o' memories (especially since I didn't even remember writing on most of them). Once I was done reminiscing, I got down to business and sorted the corks by length and width. You'd think most corks are uniform, but that is so not the case— and the little stubby ones are no bueno for stuff like this.

Then came the arranging. This took a lot longer than I thought it would, because I wanted to spread the colored corks out pretty evenly.

It was smooth sailing... til the very end... can YOU spot the missing piece?

After about 10 minutes of rearranging, I finally found a way to make it work (cue Tim Gunn)!

TA-DA!

The last step was to remove each cork and glue it in one-by-one. Sigh... I loooove my glue gun. The final product turned out great, and looks just like the one above, but here are some more photos because I'm obsessed with my new cork board.

Now we have to find a place for it. I think I've staked out the perfect wall in the dining room. I'm glad I said "we" like the Mister has any say-so where this is going. Hah!

I'd like to give a shoutout to Mr. and Mrs. S. for getting us this awesome gift, and to Tiegan for sitting patiently beside me, instead of indulging in her need to "investigate" all the corks on the carpet. Good girl!