In honor of Earth Day this year, Anthropologie collected corks for use in their store window displays.  As someone who has been saving corks from my wine bottles for years now, my interest was piqued. I haven’t yet decided what to do with my collection, but now I’ve collected some great inspiration! Of course, it takes time to collect enough corks to make much of anything, and now my collection of dozens (maybe a couple hundred?) looks tiny compared to some of these large scale cork projects. So, I doubt I’ll be making a Corkxedo (yes, really, a tuxedo made of corks) anytime soon!

After Anthropologie breaks down their cork window displays, the corks will go to Cork ReHarvest where they will go on to become fishing bobs, brand-new flooring, paper pulp and more.

Cork is a green resource and is 100% natural, renewable, recyclable and biodegradable.  “Trees are not cut down to harvest cork, rather, the bark is harvested by hand every 9 years. Cork oak trees can live up to 300 years, so they are very sustainable resource! Approximately 6.6 million acres of Mediterranean cork forest extend across Portugal, Spain, Algeria, Morocco, Italy, Tunisia and France. These oak forests support one of the world’s highest levels of forest biodiversity, second only to the Amazonian Rainforest.”  -Cork ReHarvest

Anthropologie window images via Facebook and Flickr

Tres Birds Workshop, a local architectural design firm, created this sound dampening cork installation for Dragons in Boulder, CO.

“An open floor plan demanding some level of sound mitigation. After researching sound attenuation the decision is made to go cellular. The process begins by stuffing tens of thousands of reclaimed corks into steel rings. Organic dividers are sculpted to break up sound, provide privacy, and create pin-up spaces.” – tres birds

The Guinness Record holder for the largest cork mosaic is artist Saimir Stratigoes. This mural is comprised of 229,764 corks and took 27 days to create. source: Dezine

That represents alot of bottles of wine!

Scott Gundersen is another artist who “paints” with cork. See a time lapse video of the creation of this portrait “Grace” on his Tumblr, which used close to 10,000 corks.

How about a cork chair? Gabriel Wiese makes these corky creations. Wonder if they are actually comfortable?  via DailyArtMuse

The “Corkxedo” is certainly an interesting twist on sustainable clothing design, though I can’t imagine actually wearing such a thing!  via DrinkNectar and Luxist

And if that wasn’t enough, here is the late Robert Mondavi wearing a stunning cork jacket:

And yet another version of the cork jacket:

Hmmm….I think I’ll keep to tailoring with wool and reserve my cork collection for a table top or mosaic wall piece instead.