making: corkboard before/after

The holiday fervour is winding to it's dizzying climax, and all gift making and buying is drawing to a close. But here is a fun do it yourself home project that you can make, for a gift or for whatever. I feel like I am always looking at creative ways to display/organize/showcase my little collections of ephemera that I am constantly collecting. Photos, doodles, interesting business cards or fortune cookie fortunes. All the little bits that build up so quickly. I don't want to throw these thins away, as after all I have collected them and they clearly hold some importance to me, but I don't want them to molder in piles. I want to enjoy them. So bulletin boards are a good solution.

This is one that I came up with using supplies that I had on hand, and some creative problem solving on my part, if I do say so myself. You see I had a frame but no cork board. So I thought about it for a moment, and realized that I in fact had a bag of wine corks from work (I was at the time working at a bar and had collected up a big pile of corks thinking I might someday find a use for them) and as most wine corks are made of cork (though phasing out in some places as it turns there are other materials that work better despite being less traditional) I had my material right there.

Now all I had to do is cut each of those corks into tiny 1/4 inch slices. Enough tiny 1/4 inch slices that I could fill a whole large frame that I had picked up for a few bucks at a garage sale knowing I would find a use for it some day (see a reacquiring theme here?!) which I had spray painted white. I laid out all of the squares until the filled the interior of the frame and glued them to a piece of board for the backing.
And Voila! I had a true cork board, that serves it's display providing purposes, makes me look like a bit of a wine-o and is visually interesting even when it is not all covered in stuff! I would say that is a triple win. Though I have to admit I acquired a sizable blister from cutting corks into slice, still in the end a fun (in a tedious way that I enjoy) and problem solving problem.