super cheap/easy wine glass charms!

I've seen lots of wine glass charms for sale from everywhere from the Dollar Tree to The Container Store to various craft stores and K-Mart.

Although I loved the idea, I didn't think we needed them, because we rarely served wine or champagne and didn't even have wine glasses until our wedding gifts were opened.

Then, at Thanksgiving, 2 of my aunts raided my ribbon collection to tie different colored ribbon to their glasses to tell them apart, I decided I should consider getting (or making) some.

I came across this blog post showing off these gorgeous charms, and I was inspired:

Remembering the ribbon raid at Thanksgiving, and knowing we would be hosting Christmas, I decided to make something to label wine glasses this time. I didnt have the desire to make something as fancy as Tamara did at Etceroize, and wanted to make them for free (stuff I already owned).

I had come across a package of red/white/green "chenille stems" aka "pipe cleaners" when I was unpacking Christmas stuff. I had bought them for another project years ago but didn't use them. I thought cutting tags or other die cuts out with my Cricut, but I wanted this project to be even easier than that. Having just recently organized my Christmas gift wrap similarly to how I did my generic gift wrap I remembered some little card gift tags on strings mixed in with the peel and stick gift tags.

So I had the general idea in mind and got to work:

I measured the pipe cleaner and found about 1/2 is perfect for my wine glasses. cut them all in half.

I twisted the pipe cleaner around the stems and then removed them.

I tried hole-punching the tag hole bigger so it can be strung directly onto the pipe cleaner but didn't like how it looked, and it started ripping. So instead, I wound the string (that was already on the tag) around the end of the pipe cleaner a bunch of times, so it only dangled down a bit.

Then, to hold the string in place better, i folded the tip of the pipe cleaner back on itself over the string.

There were about 6 different gift tag designs in the set. While winding the pipe cleaners I found that the red white and green colors were actually 3 smaller pipecleaners twisted together, so I untwisted them to make even more design combinations. People could have written their name on the back of the tags, but this made theme easier, and re-usable.

I made 4 of each tag design, a tri-colored one and one of each color. I left one on a glass stem and put the rest inside the glass for display, so people can choose the tag they like and put it on their either wine or champange glass.

I very much enjoyed my snow man on white stem with my martinelli's sparkling cider, and made it easy to spot my glass, even from across the room.

Not a lot of people drank wine or champagne or sparkling cider at our gathering, but these were so easy and cheap to make, that I wasn't disappointed more of them didn't get used, I can pack them away and use them again next year!

this project could also be done with gift wrapping ribbon / store bought or home made tags also, if you don't have pipe cleaners. Lke Tammy at The Sweet Spot made with her new craft toy

Cost of this project:
for me: $FREE
if starting with none of the supplies: about $2
The gift tags came from the Dollar Tree a few years ago.
I estimate the pipe cleaners were about $1 / package also.
Time: maybe 30 minutes, not much time at all.