Posted by
My favourite souvenirs from travel seem to be drink-related. I have a bunch of corks that I’ve saved from vineyard tours; bottle caps from my favourite beer at a brewery tour; and paper pub coasters from places like Hofbräuhaus. They’re sentimental and touristy at the same time (not to mention cheap and easy to bring back home) — but right now they’re just packed away. I want a way to display them that’s tasteful or even useful, and I’m inspired by this quote from Suzanne and Tim over on Offbeat Bride:
We have a tradition at home that, when we open wine with friends, we write the date and the names of everyone present on the cork. I thought since the wedding was at a winery, using this as a guest book would be a great idea. We’ll display the corks at home in a shadowbox with one of the wedding photos.
That’s a great idea! In the spirit of displaying drinking mementos, I’ve rounded up some DIY inspiration. Cheers!
Homies, raise a glass and let me know: how do you display your drink-related collections?
Those are all wonderful ideas for displaying corks and bottle caps.
I’m mainly commenting because of the mention of Brutopia brought back some good memories, even though I’ve only been there a couple of times. Their Raspberry Blond is amazingly good and I’ve been trying to find something like it elsewhere ever since without much success. A beer called Ruby from McMenamins is the closest thing I’ve found thus far.
i turn my bottle caps and corks into pendants and earrings.
my boyfriend and i recently started putting our corks in a vase. just a random vase i had sitting around. we just finished it a couple months ago and moving onto a new vase was so cool! i actually “won” a centerpiece at a friends wedding, somehow ended up with two of them, and those two are the second and third. we put all corks in them, synthetic, champagne, regular. i think it looks very cool.
My parents secretly asked the bartender at our wedding to save all of the corks from the wine. Then they strung them together with chunky bright red beads into a garland and gave it to us for Christmas that year. It’s now my favorite Christmas tree decoration to pull out annually
Oh man, I LOVE this idea! I think I’ve made my decision as to what to do with mine!
We have all our microbrewery/limited run bottle caps saved in a decorative pitcher for now, but plan to create a bar top or table top covered in resin once we are no longer moving around.
Wow – that sounds awesome! I always want to make my collected goods into furniture, but haven’t managed to yet. It also vaguely reminds me of the 100,000 silver dollar bar in Montana, ha ha
So cool! I did some DIYing with Jones Soda pictures and bottle caps around 12 years ago:
– I wanted to save the pictures I’d found on Jones soda bottles, so my uncle crafted me a decorative end table with 1/4″ lip around the edge. I Mod-Podged labels and bottle caps onto the table, then filled the 1/4″ with clear resin. It makes a fun decorative table, and the resin is yellowing as it ages, which creates an unexpected vintage effect as time passes.
– I also Mod-Podged soda labels onto the outside of an ugly plastic trash basket. Now you can’t see the original mint color of the trash basket; all you see is the white trash bag and the colorful soda labels. It has seriously upped the “cool” factor of our bathroom.
Edited to add: just be sure you use a bazillion layers of Mod Podge. I originally only used 2 layers of Mod Podge on the trash basket, and I had to go back a year later and re-attach corners of labels that were curling up. That time I used about 5 coats, and I haven’t had any trouble since.
I keep all my caps and corks in a glass jar on my counter. My parents have a huge glass vase full of wine corks