I have to admit, Joey is a genius.  A few months ago, when browsing through the bins at Goodwill Outlet, he stumbled upon a giant pile of wine corks and a fan grate.  He excitedly called me over to look at what he had found.  To me it just looked like a bunch of junk; however, Joey saw something special in those materials.  He had a vision, and I’m glad I allowed him to follow his vision, because now I have an incredible wine cork chandelier which was made from those seemly useless items.  You can follow the tutorial below to make your own.

Materials:

• Fan grate
• 60-100 wine corks
• String
• 60-100 screw eye hooks (214 x 13/16)
• Rope (medium thickness)
• Picture hanging wire
• Pipe fastener

Instructions:

Start by screwing the hooks into the wine corks. Then you need to determine how many layers of corks you want and how long you want each layer to be. Following that decision, you can cut strings to the appropriate lengths.  You will then take each string and tie one end of it to the hook and the other end to the fan grate.  Arrange the strings on the fan to create the desired look.  Joey and I found that 4 layers worked well for our chandelier.  We tied the longest strings to the inner edge of the fan and then worked our way out.  You want to tie the string to a stable base so it wont move around.   Fan grates typically have three bases: the inner edge, the outer edge, and a circular beam about a third of the way from the edge.  Since we wanted four layers, we had to create a fourth base.  To do this, we molded picture hanging wire into a circle and attached it a few inches from the center edge.  Later we wove rope around the wire to conceal the uneven wire edges.  Then we created a handle to hang it from by screwing a pipe fastener into the inner edge of the fan grate.  We also wrapped rope around the fastener.  Then we tied an additional piece of rope to the handle and hung it from a hook in the roof.

Pretty cool, huh? The best part of this whole project is that it cost less than $15 and most of the items were thrifted.

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