Audra Lowe: We all enjoy a good glass of wine but who knew that the cork could actually be multipurpose. Rhiannon met up with lifestyle expert Mar Jennings for a creative way to recycle the cork.

Rhiannon: Today, we’re talking wine corks and we’ve all thrown plenty of these away over the years but it’s time to keep them. Today Better and our lifestyle expert Mar Jennings is showing us an easy way to turn these into something practical.

Mar: Easy, simple family project and it’s about recycling and making something old something new and all of us are collecting a lot of wine and we’re consuming it and we have a lot of cork left over.

Rhiannon: Okay, when I keep these my husband calls be a pack rat but we can actually turn these into a trivet.

Mar: A trivet and that’s what we are going to do.

What you do is you start collecting, once you collect them you want to identify about 22 different corks and you want to make sure when you’re looking at them, see this would not be a great one because it’s cracked, so you want to make sure that it is solid. So, this one goes to the trash. We want to find a really great one and if it has a great label on it, even better, if you remember it, okay go ahead and select that.

Go ahead and select the couple pieces and we’ve done already. And now, what you’re going to need in this project is you’re going to need some fishing line, you’re going to need a drill with 1/8 drill bit and then of course some cork and that’s it, that’s all we need.

Now what I’ve done is I stepped it up a little bit. You need to work in a surface where if you are drilling, you’re going to protect your table.

Rhiannon: Not on your granite kind of top.

Mar: No, you don’t want to do it on that. So, if you don’t have something like this that I made is a little bit more elaborate, you can go ahead and take a clamp that works just as well.

Rhiannon: Okay, so we’re going to drill two holes.

Mar: Two holes, you’re going to drill on top, in the center and at the bottom, in the center as well. So, go ahead and do that. And you’ll realize if you put a little pressure on the drill and you push all the way through and up, excellent, one more time all the way through and up, excellent. Now, you’re going to do that 11 times twice and 11 times just the top.

So, what we’re going to do now is we’re going to take it and you’re going to thread it. It’s a little bit like sewing.

Rhiannon: So, no sewing, but no sewing skills needed.

Mar: You know no sewing skills really required, it’s simple, anyone can do this. And once you have 11, it’s going to look a lot like this. So, this is less than 11 but for the sake of time, we’re just going to go ahead and put in a circle motion.

Rhiannon: This could be a smaller one.

Mar: Okay, it could be a smaller one. The idea is you can elaborate off of this, have fun with it. The key is that you can kind of change the design style but this is the principal way of doing it. And once you’ve put it together, you’re going to make a granny knot and what that is, is basically a double knot and you want to make sure there’s some slack in between because you want to make sure that you’re putting a cork in between each one of them. So, you’re going to tie that a knot and then when you tighten a knot, you're going to go ahead and go to next level and that’s the outside and that’s the one that you're just doing, the one. The same process, you're going to go ahead and thread it all the way through, make a knot and you're good to go.

Rhiannon: Now, if you wanted to make this even bigger, you can even expand with another knot.

Mar: You absolutely can, you can add a completely extra level if you like, you’re just going to keep adding to it. You could make it a doily if you like. The idea is that you want to do something creative and you want to be resourceful of using things in a brand new modern way and it’s a wonderful way to remember the bottle of wine that you’ve had. And how many of us take things form the oven and we don’t exactly have some thing to put it on the table, this is a great way to transfer those beautiful items from your oven right to your table and it’s protected and it looks beautiful.

Rhiannon: Look at that.

Mar: A home run, right? Anyone can do this. Have fun with it.

Rhiannon: Anyone can do it as long as you like to drink. Find new reasons.

Mar: And you’re going to have this better.com the website and we’ll have all the information so you can follow us.

Rhiannon: Yes, we’re going to put all of that in bettertv.com including a link to your website. Thank you so much for doing this today. This was so much fun and I learned how to use a drill.

Mar: My pleasure. You sure did.