It’s guest posting tiiimmmeeee. No?  Doesn’t work like “T-shirt Time” ala DJ Pauly D? Don’t judge me for watching Jersey Shore. You know you sneak it in after the kids are in bed.

Anyway, today’s guest post is from Dawn over at Whispers & Shouts. We met thanks to the blogging world and realized that we live just a few blocks from each other! She has a hilarious blog all about life with twin boys. Calvin and Clark are the cutest 2.5 year old twins that I know and Molly agrees!

Today she’s sharing how she made a bulletin board out of wine corks! My wine cork container is currently overflowing (thanks to my wine dependency enthusiasm), so maybe I should try this out to get rid of some. Although, finding wall space may be a bit more challenging…

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Glue guns are one of the best parts of crafts. A gun that makes things stay where you want them to stay? Awesome. Empowering. Hot. This year I tried to be crafty for Christmas gifts. It made me super excited that my twin boys are capable of helping with arts and crafts now, though I use the term helping loosely. They will be three years old in April. The first time I tried to get them to do a craft with me one of them told me he wanted to run away. But I am determined that no child of mine will run from arts and crafts. At least not until he can physically overpower me.

One of the things I made this season was a bulletin board from wine corks. I made it for my sister. She’s in college, and though it’s not something she’ll want to keep forever, I thought it would be cute and possibly useful in her quirky, college-y house. I have been saving corks off and on for a long time and my husband is always asking me to throw them away, but I keep insisting I’ll use them. So, I thought I’d save some space in our small condo by getting rid of them and make a gift that I’d been meaning to make forever. Enter, glue gun!

At first I thought I’d use an old picture frame to glue the corks into, but all the ones I could find were too thin, allowing the corks to stick up from the frame and look weird. I finally found this perfect item in the painting section of Michael’s. It’s an unprimed wooden cradle board and it fit the corks perfectly. I bought two, just in case I ruined one.

I had the boys sit down on the floor and “help” with arranging the corks in the cradle board. I tried different arrangements, but liked the way they looked when they alternated in direction. Since the sizes and shapes of corks vary somewhat, doing a practice layout first is best. The boys liked playing with the corks and I let them arrange them in different ways while I worked on painting the cradle board black with acrylic paint. I didn’t paint the inside because I didn’t want the color contrast to show off any gaps in between corks. (After the paint dries, spray it with a clear gloss glaze. I didn’t do it until after I glued the corks in, which made it more complicated. ) After the boys had had their fill of “making a present for Aunt Bean!” I arranged the corks in the cradle board I hadn’t painted. I was almost ready to load, aim, and fire my glue gun.

Another day, since I can never complete a craft in a single day, I glued the corks one by one into the cradle board. About halfway through the project, a cork slipped out of my hand right after I had covered it in hot glue. I double-clutched the cork with my ninja-fast reflexes, and caught it, allowing the hot glue to sear my flesh. Of course. I caught up on first-aid burn protocol thanks to the handy World Wide Web, as I doused my finger in water and swore at the stupid glue gun.

A few nights later, after my glue gun and I had ended our staring contest and my finger blister had faded, I finished up the gluing. I had bought a pack of pretty silver and black push-pins and the boys colored some post-its with messages to Aunt Bean and I pinned them to the board. Ta-da! Her idea is to hang it on the wall next to her front door. Since I wrapped her gift and sent it in a hurry, I forgot to figure out a way to hang it on the wall. I planned to affix a little hanging bracket, the kind with the teeth and two tiny nails, which is what she plans to do when she gets back to school. We’ll see how it works.

And that is how I got rid of some corks, made a Christmas gift, and learned to respect the glue gun.