Last week I took a few moments for an arts and crafts project. I’m pretty pleased with the result.
The last time my brother and his wife visited, they gave me a trinket that they had acquired at a Mardi Gras party in Tenakee Springs. It had floated around their sailboat home for a few years, until it came time to pass it on.
It’s a plastic medallion showing the god of wine, Bacchus, in bas relief. When I returned to making wine again, I hung it as a kind of pagan icon over the folding table where I set fermenting jugs behind the wood stove, to watch over and bless the project, as it were.
A couple of cast offs, joined to create a winemaker’s ornament (Photo: Mark Zeiger).
Around Christmas time, Michelle and I shopped for cookie cutters at our favorite local secondhand store. While not exactly what we were looking for, a rather handsome cutter made from copper caught my eye. The shape intrigued me, although I knew I’d never cut a cookie with it. A cookie made in the shape of a bunch of grapes would not be easily recognizable, or particularly appropriate to any occasion I could think of. But, it was pretty, and at 15ยข, the price was right.
When I got it home, I suddenly had an idea for a new, homemade every day ornament . I decided to work on it after Christmas, so I stuck it in a drawer. I remembered it this week, and took a moment to make it.
My idea was very simple: suspend the Bacchus medallion inside the cookie cutter. This proved easy to do, as the two shapes fit together so well that I barely needed to secure the medallion inside the cutter with glue.
I thought about shaving off the words “Mardi Gras” and the year (2004) but decided that doing so might ruin the piece, so I left them alone.
I drilled a hole at the balance point, added some fishing line for a hanger, and voila! A winemaker’s ornament.
Functional? No. Necessary? Not at all. Pleasing? Quite.