Making a Wine Cork Birdhouse

One of my favorite crafts to make are wine cork birdhouses! They're easy to make and look amazing when finished. They are perfect for decorating or giving as gifts.

Things you're going to need are:

• Wine corks
• Hot glue gun & glue sticks
• Wooden bird house
• Razor blade knife or exacto knife
• Cutting board

The wooden birdhouses can be found at your local craft store. I usually get mine from JoAnn's because they have a pretty good variety of shapes and sizes.

The razor blade knife works best when cutting the corks in half length wise. Personally, I think cutting the corks in half makes a cleaner looking finished product because it's not as bulky as using whole corks. It is also great because you don't need as many when you cut them in half! Champagne corks also look great when mixed in with regular corks. Fake corks can have really cool designs and are much easier to cut than real corks, it just depends on what type of look you want to go for.  It is important to lay the cut pieces out on each side of the house BEFORE gluing. You will find that you need to trim some corks to make them fit neatly. Once the glue dries, it is not an easy task removing the pieces.

For the birdhouse above, I left whole corks on the sides to give it a log cabin look, but used half corks for the front to keep the bulk down. As you can see toward the top you have to trim pieces to fill in the holes, doing whatever you can to make them fit! Here is a side view of the house. 

For the roof, I cut a whole cork into about 8 circle pieces and layered them into shingles. Cutting the circles in half makes for fun decorative pieces for any left over wood that is still showing. Here are a few different style bird houses.

The smaller bird house was much more difficult than the larger ones! I thought it would be a quick project but it was harder to find corks that would fit because you don't have as much room to work with. With some time and a lot of trimming, it ended up turning out cute. Just keep in mind that the bigger ones give you more room to work with.