It’s finally starting to look like fall in Boston, just in time for Thanksgiving! Wait… how is it already Thanksgiving? Is it just me? I feel like this year is seriously flying by… To decorate the thanksgiving table, we made these sculpey pilgrim hat wine stoppers! Or, if you don’t drink wine, you can cork whatever you want with them like olive oil!
Before we get to the DIY, I’m going to tell you my thanksgiving story. Here it goes. A bunch of years ago, my parents met at thanksgiving because my mom’s best friend and my dad’s best friend were dating. In my head it’s a lot longer of a story than that…
And I’m so thankful my parents met each other, not only because it means that I’m here, but because they love each other so much and they are always so endlessly supportive. So every year when we go around the thanksgiving table and talk about what we are all thankful for, I always feel obligated to say, “well I’m thankful for my parents, so I’m thankful for thanksgiving…” And as a kid it always felt silly, like I had to say that and wasn’t allowed to think of anything else. But now, as I get older, the more I don’t care because at the top of my list is always that I’m thankful for my parents because I’m so lucky to have such an incredible family.
This is getting way soppier than I had intended when I sat down to start writing! Besides family and friends, and food… what’s the next best part of thanksgiving? Did you say drinking wine with family and friends and food? Good. That’s what I thought. In honor of wine, we decided to make these cute pilgrim hat wine stoppers. They would make the perfect gift with a bottle of wine as a guest or make them for your own table at home. If you’re having thanksgiving with fellow crafty people, I’d suggest just making a few sculpey pilgrim hats and bringing your glue gun and gluing them to the corks of each wine bottle you open through the night. Or just make them at home before you get there.. whatever floats your boat.
Here’s what you need to make the sculpey pilgrim hat wine stoppers:
- Sculpey – black, white, yellow (if you don’t have colors, you can always paint white sculpey when it’s dry)
- Cork wine stoppers – you can either buy these from the craft store, or just use the cork of bottles you open, up to you!
- A hot glue gun and glue
- Parchment paper
It couldn’t be easier to make these cute wine stoppers, so you literally have no excuses this time! Here’s how to make them:
- Lay out your parchment paper on a surface you can work on.
- Roll a clump of sculpey into a ball – this will be the body of the hat, so use as big of a piece as you want the hat to be. Make sure it is at least as big as the cork wine stopper, but we thought it looked nicer if it was even bigger (about an inch and a quarter to an inch and a half in diameter).
- Start shaping your ball into a cone shape with a flat top and bottom. We did this by rolling it at an angle on the parchment paper on the table and pressing the top and the bottom flat. Keep working at it until it looks hat shaped! (See photo below).
- Grab a new piece of black – about an inch or so – and roll it into a ball and press it flat into a pancake. This will be the brim of the hat. Once it’s in the shape of the pancake, lay the body of the hat on top of it and see if it looks ok, if it’s too big or small, add or take away clay and redo this step. Once it’s just right, firmly press the body and the brim of the hat together so they stick well.
- Roll the white out into a snake and press it flat. This will be the trim between the brim and the body of the hat. You can decide how thick you want it to be. Wrap it around the hat.
- Roll the yellow into a thinner snake but don’t press it flat! carefully make a small rectangle to place on the white rim.
- Once your sculpey hat is assembled, bake it according to the package instructions – Mine said to bake at 275 F for 15 minutes per 1/4 inch, so mine was in there about 30 or 40 minutes, checking every 10 minutes after the first 20 minutes. I baked it on a baking sheet lined with parchment.
- Once your sculpey is baked and cooled, warm up your hot glue gun and glue the hat to your cork! Now you’re ready to cork some wine bottles with your pilgrim hat wine stoppers!
I love playing with sculpey! Let us know in the comments if you have other sculpey crafts we should do! Or if you have other wine stopper ideas… Also, if you like any of the other table decorations in the first picture, keep checking back here because we’re doing a whole thanksgiving table DIY series!
We printed out basic leaf stencils from the interweb and then Rose stenciled them onto the cork board and cut them out using an exacto knife. This was a bit more of a delicate process than one would think, so be careful with your cuts. Cork board tends to rip and break off, and you wouldn’t want your acorn to lose its stem now would you? As you can see some of our poor acorns heads got a bit chopped off. But, ya know, nature ain’t perfect!
Finally once we cut out all the leafs and acorns our hearts desired, we began to embroider. For this, we took embroidery thread and took only 4 of the strands of it. We found that using all the strands was too thick for the cork and made bigger holes in it than we wanted. We used a regular needle for embroidery and just remembered to knot the thread before we started. Again, be careful at this step because the cork can break easily. If you have to undo a stitch, just be careful pulling it back out that you don’t break anything. We played around with different patterns and styles on all of the different leafs. We also chose fun bright colors so you would really be able to see the string.
