Yuletide Recycling (or up-cycling as I believe it is known)

I love this time of year - the build up to Christmas is well under way and everywhere is looking very festive with more Christmas lights and decorations appearing every day (when you can see them through the lashing rain/hail/sleet anyway!). 

So, to get into the Christmas spirit, here are some ideas for some whisky/drink related Christmas decorations.

Now I don’t know about you, but in our house we go through a lot of wine. For some inexplicable reason we started chucking the corks into a big bowl in the living room rather than in the bin. Not sure why but it did result in us building up a bit of a cork mountain. What to do with them all? Just throwing them away didn't seem right so I decided to thread some onto ribbons to make Christmas tree garlands out of them, as you do. Now obviously I am a bit biased but I think they look pretty good hanging on the tree.  As I mentioned though, we do go through a lot of wine, and there’s only so many cork garlands you can fit on one tree so we do have a bit of a surplus of cork garlands now! Any takers? I can always add some to the webshop… 

Continuing the Christmas tree decorations theme, this year I also made some baubles out of some bungs we had lying about the house (no, sadly we don’t have our own private warehouse at home, they were left over from our wedding last year when we used them as place name settings.) Adds a bit of rustic whisky-ness to the tree I feel, without it being too blatant! 

As you can see, my own creations are very much small scale but others take it to a totally different level.

At the Campbeltown Christmas Market this year The Wee Toon Carver had a fantastic Christmas tree made entirely out of old cask staves. Very cool indeed. Just to add to the effect it was decorated with fairy lights and  whisky miniatures - who wouldn’t want one of them at home?  Not only pretty to look at but practical too as the ‘branches’ all rotate so it can be packed away flat for storage. 

My absolute favourite bit of whisky themed Christmas recycling/upcycling of recent years though has got to be the Jack Daniels barrel Christmas tree. (Have you seen the advert?) I want one! Sadly we don’t have a big enough garden or I would be round at Springbank trying to scrounge enough empty casks to build one for myself! … Maybe a tad excessive but hey, it’s Christmas!