Guest Post: Easy Peasy Recycled Wine Cork Bird House Ornaments

Hello all -- Catherine Scanlon here to share a super fun and cute ornament you can make from recycled wine corks.

Before I get started with that though, I should say that I'm a saver. I save a lot of things intending to use them -- sometimes I see something on Pinterest that gives me an idea or just things pop into my head and I can't stop thinking about that....like my wine corks. Not that I drink a lot of wine, but over the course of 25 years you tend to have a lot of things when you like to save them. I recently broke down and took a bag of them to the recycling center. I couldn't part with them all though, I'm sure you know how that goes.

When I saw this super cool paper bead Key Chain on Pinterest the sky opened, the angels sang -- and I saw wine cork bird houses in my head.

The best part is, they turned out so much cuter than I imagined!

I will share the only hint about making these ornaments easy: it is so much easier if your corks are straight, meaning not larger at the top than at the bottom. 

• I started by covering all my corks with paper.
• Some I used patterned paper and some I used vintage music paper. Craft glue or hot glue works great to secure the paper in place around the cork. 
• If the paper hangs over at all use a sanding block to sand that off.
• For the roof and base of the house I used a large and small Vintaj Brass Round Blanks and drilled a tiny hole (just large enough for the screw eye to fit through) in the center of all the blanks.  
• To create a cool pattern for the roof I ran each blank through my Big Shot Machine with an Embossing Folder to emboss a pretty pattern on both of the blanks. When I ran out of the Vintaj blanks I used my Sizzix Big Shot to cut the same size disks out of sheet metal.

• To secure the large blank to the top I inserted a small screw eye into the hole I had drilled and screwed it into place. (Optional: a large bead of hot glue will help secure it in place permanently!)
• For the bottom I inserted a fancy pin into the small blank and centered it on the bottom of the wine cork. (I also used hot glue to secure the bottom one in place.)  

• Next comes the fun part -- adding the decorations. Since the Vintaj disks already have holes drilled in the edge I used that to dangle a metal bird charm from the "roof" of the house. 
• You can change the bottom by adding a screw eye to the bottom of the house, or drill a hole in a thimble and dangle bells from the center. 
• A small pin with a bead on the end trimmed to 1/2" long inserted into the side of the cork looks like the little stick the birds sit on before tending to the babies in the house. 
• To finish, you can create hangers from pre-made bead chain and add fun decorations like vintage dog tags, or other blanks from Vintaj. You could really use anything that you like! 

I love how my little bird houses came out -- and I've already given several of them away to the bird lovers in my life! The only reason I stopped making them is I ran out of bird charms! I can't wait to get some more :-)

Thank you so much for joining me today -- I hope you will take a visit to my blog and see some of the other things I'm sharing this holiday season!

Have a great day, make it recycled -- and make it crafty!

Catherine