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Wine has become a very popular decorative theme for kitchens and dining rooms in recent years. However, much of the store-bought dcor with a wine theme tends to be a bit cheap and cheesy. If you're lucky enough to have the time and money for a trip to Napa Valley, you can pick up some stylist decorative items there, but if not, you can reuse your own empty wine bottles and corks for some beautiful and easy craft projects that will really add a unique style to your wine dcor.

Start by saving all of your corks when you finish a bottle of wine. I put them in a wicker basket in my dining room that actually serves as a decorative piece until I have enough for a project. Actually, the first project is almost as simple as this. Simply purchase an extra large wine glass (think, fit for a giant) and fill it up with different interesting wine corks and put it on display on a shelf or coffee table. Regular-sized wine glasses filled with decorative glass stones in red, white or light yellow are also a cheap and easy decoration that give the illusion that there is actually wine in the glass.

The second project is almost as easy, but has a lot of impact. All you will need is a few corks, some small round magnets and glue gun. Pick out your most interesting corks and glue a magnet to the side (not the ends) and you have instant style for your fridge. Make sure that you purchase magnets that are large enough to have some hold, but not so large that they stick out from behind the cork (about inch will do just fine). If you have a message board in your kitchen, you can create interesting thumbtacks using the same method and some flat pushpins.

The next cork project will require that you have quite a few more wine corks than the first two, so you may need to enlist some friends to save them for you if you aren't a big wine drinker. Purchase a nice wooden or metal serving tray from your local home-goods store and carefully arrange your corks so that they cover the bottom of the tray. Since not all wine corks are the same size and shape, you will want to lay them out before applying any glue to make sure that you are not leaving unnecessary gaps. Once you have your pattern established and your corks lain out, you can start to glue them down. This is a much more tedious project that the first two, but still quite easy and costs very little, depending on the tray that you choose. When you are done, you have a nice decorative piece that you can use to display wine glasses, candles or whatever you choose. You could even continue to use it as a serving try if you like.

Finally, in similar fashion you can create unique and stylish placemats and hot plates just by gluing corks together to form shapes. Unless you are meticulous about the size and shape of corks that you collect, the edges of these creations may not be perfect, but in this case it only adds character. If you are really bothered by this non-uniformity, you could easily trim the edges of the corks with a sharp tool.

Finally, don't forget that wine bottles that you haven't consumed yet can make cheap and easy decorations of their own, as can labels collected from used wine bottles. Soak the bottles in warm water and a bit of dish soap and they should peel off easily. Then you can use them to make collages that can be framed, mounted on candles or set under the glass of your coffee table.

Remember that while all of these projects are inexpensive (minus the cost of the wine that you would be drinking anyways), they actually look more tasteful and chic than much of the wine dcor that you would find at a home goods store.

Learn more about this author, Marie Gerber.
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