Esmeralda sent me “a baggie of stuff both to stump you and to help me figure what to do with it”. In her package:

• A small baggie of silk noils

• Two different lumpy, bumpy fibers
• A skein of brown silk floss
• Metal button pins with dinosaurs on them
• Wine bottle corks
• Assorted beads and jewelry findings

I think right off the bat, I was drawn to the wine corks, and wanted to find a way to show off the pretty designs on them. They sort of struck me as great big beads, and I had a vision of them hanging from the fibers. I started thinking about wine, and decided that a good way to show off all the items in the package would be to do a sort of shrine that included a wine bottle, which I conveniently had in my workroom.

I made a paper pattern to determine the size of the paper I wanted to wrap around the bottle, and then cut some plastic screening slightly larger than the paper. I used this and the silk noils to create a piece of paper. (Somewhere in the articles section is the how-to for making silk paper, with step by step instructions for this technique.)

There were two different lumpy fibers in Esmeralda’s package: one with metallic threads in it, and one without. I decided to use the one without to add more texture to my paper. I simply threaded my machine with gold metallic thread, set it on a wide zig-zag stitch, and sewed the fiber in random lines on the paper. The finished piece of paper looked pretty interesting all by itself, and could easily have been cut up to use for cards or artist trading cards, or applied in one big piece to a collage or altered book. But no, it’s going to be a big label for my wine bottle…

I wrapped the finished piece of paper around the bottle, and tied it in place with the silk floss. A good thing to know about silk fibers: they’re some of the strongest things on the planet. Although the floss looked very delicate, it easily held the paper in place without breaking.

I wrapped and tied randomly, leaving the ends hanging from the knots.

I decided to use the metal buttons to decorate the bottle. But dinosaurs? Too cutesy for me. I burned the dinos off with a torch, and then buffed them with a sanding block to make them shiny.

I pinned the buttons through the paper to attach them, and then tied more silk floss around them to make sort of rough tassels. I had some fibers leftover from the papermaking, so I tied them around the neck of the bottle, and used another pin and more fibers there.

I found a tall, narrow pine box in my stash that was the pefect size to hold a wine bottle. However, it was a little bland. I painted both the interior and exterior with some homemade walnut ink. (Instructions for making this are in the September 2005 issue of The Monthly Muse.) This really helped to raise the grain of the wood, and made my boring pine box much more interesting.

When the box was dry, I glued a bunch of fake grapes to the exterior with E6000.

Next, I stamped the interior and exterior of the box with black dye ink.

I drilled holes in the bottom of the box, so I’d have a place to hang things. Through the holes went the second bunch of fibers.

I used an awl to expand the holes in the corks, then threaded them onto the fibers hanging from the box, along with the beads.

Here’s the result: