How to Make a Wine Rack {As Seen on TLC’s Craft Wars!}

The title of this post should have been “How to Make a Wine Rack from Silverware, Pie Tins, Footballs, Acorns, and Turkey Basters” but I felt that was a little long!

All of those crazy supplies were what Jen and I were given in our pop craft challenge earlier this week on Craft Wars!

In case you missed the show, you can catch us in action on iTunes, but we thought it would be fun to give everyone the step-by-step how-to for creating one your own!

I’ve adorned mine with my apron that I wore on the show (which many of you have asked about…Yes, I made it myself!) and a second place ribbon, because honestly, I’ve never been prouder to come in second. Jen and I are so happy with the crafts we did on the show, and this entire experience has been one of the most exciting things to ever happen to us! We wouldn’t change a thing!

If you’d like to stop by Jen’s blog, take a peek around, and give her a high five for being the best Craft Wars partner a girl could ever ask for, start here!

Enjoy,

Nikki, In Stitches

Materials:

• Plywood (You’ll need two pieces cut 20″ x 30″.)
• Jigsaw
• Trim (On the show we used 1″ x 2″ trim, but at home I actually just cut “trim-like” 2″ strips of plywood, and it worked just fine!)
• Chalkboard paint and paintbrush
• 1 yard of fabric to cover frame
• 1 yard of batting (At home I used scraps of quilt batting I had left over!)
• Staple gun and staples
• Cordless drill, 1/4″ drill bit, and screws
• Clamp
• Silverware (On the show we used a combination of 3 spoons and 3 forks. You can see in the picture above that at home I just used 6 spoons.)
• 3 turkey basters
• 1/2 yard of fabric to cover turkey basters
• Spray adhesive
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks
• Felt (This is for covering the back. You’ll need a piece about 18″ x 28″.)

Directions:

1. Cut two pieces of plywood 20″ x 30″. Paint one side of one piece with black chalkboard paint. (Be sure to give it at least two coats of paint! I’m not sure if it made it to air, but judge Stephen Brown of Glitterville commented on my poor paint job during his critique!)

2. Cut 2 pieces of trim to 30″ long. Cut 2 pieces of trim to 15 3/4″ long.

3. Cut 4 strips of fabric about 9 inches wide. (I just left them the length off the bolt…about 40″ from selvage to selvage.) Cut 4 strips of batting the same size.

4. Staple one piece of batting and one piece of fabric to the back of each piece of trim. (If you watched our episode closely, you’ll see we didn’t use batting there. We wanted to, but again, that whole only have an hour thing! I included it here because the judges called us out on it, saying it would have looked nicer, and I agree!)

5. One by one, screw trim to the plywood base. Then wrap batting and fabric around to the back of the piece and staple in place. A few notes here:

• Layer the two pieces of plywood together, with the chalkboard painted surface at the top. (The reason for two pieces of plywood? This is very technical….our screws were too long and would have stuck out the back if we just used one layer!)
• Use the clamp to hold all three layers together (the two pieces of plywood and the trim). It will makes things much easier!
• Make sure your paint is completely dry! Your fabric will end up on the plywood background while you screw the three layers together and you don’t want it to end up with black spots on it!
• I did the two long sides first, then the top and bottom.
• The long sides are easy…wrap them right around to the back. The short sides take a bit more patience to get the mitered corner effect!

6. With a cordless drill and 1/4″ drill bit, put a hole in the very top of each piece of silverware. (Note: On the show we actually used a drill press. That was so much easier! If you have one or know someone that has one, use it!)

7.  Using a clamp to keep your silverware in place, and a lot of muscle power, bend each piece of silverware twice, each time at a right angle, so it looks kind of like a zig-zag.

8. Screw silverware to the plywood. (If you look in the finished picture, you’ll see we staggered our silverware. I liked the look of the bottles facing alternating directions!)

9. Cut squares of fabric to cover the bottom of the turkey basters. The squares should be roughly 10″. Give them a coat of spray adhesive, place the turkey baster right in the middle, and start wrapping it up. Tuck the ends of the fabric inside. (The spray adhesive won’t actually stick the fabric to the turkey baster, but it will help the fabric stick to itself, which makes getting nice, neat folds in your fabric much easier!)

10. Use hot glue to adhere the covered turkey basters to the bottom of the plywood base. (Be careful what you hang on them! Let’s face it…the hot glue is not going to hold very much weight! Ideally, you could screw a dowel to the board first, then put the turkey baster over that to give it much more stability, but remember….we only had one hour!)

11. Use spray adhesive to adhere a large piece of felt (18″ x 28″) to the back of your wine rack!

12. Add a few bottles of wine and enjoy!