I have a perfectly good reason for taking this long to get back to The Blog. It was fun writing about Elletu's hands at last year's Spa Day. Since I wrote that post, this year's Spa Day has come and gone--it was on April 20--and Elletu's hands have once again been dipped in the wax and are looking and feeling quite soft and beautiful. Spa Day will do that for you. But the tale of my hand, in particular my right one, oh, that is not a pretty one. My hand was not left looking and feeling soft and beautiful after what I call 'The Incident.' They are fine now, but my fingernails may never be the same. It was an experience I don't really like to think about, let alone write about, but here goes, 'The Tale of Firstelle's Hand,' as recounted by me, Firstelle.
We Bethel Valley Girls do enjoy a glass of wine now and then (and then and now). This didn't really take hold for me until we moved in to our present home two years ago. It happens to have a wine bar built in, and goodness, we need to make use of it, don't we? So we keep it stocked, and when bottles are uncorked the corks go in the drawer. I never thought of wine corks as being useful for craft projects until Cool totally surprised and overwhelmed me with a large and gorgeous wreath made out of a large number of wine corks. This was for Christmas 2011, and I have the wreath hanging on the wall inside our wine bar. Last year I was in a second-hand shop in Port Townsend and found a wine cork trivet with 50 corks glued in to a wood frame. I got it for a mere $3. I couldn't pass it up, and it is propped up against the side wall in our wine bar. I love that thing so much, I decided I wanted to make one for each of my BVG Sisters for Christmas 2013.
Another friend of mine--not a BVG and not a wine drinker--had been with me when I purchased my own trivet and spoke of wanting to make some myself. Shortly after that she was at her friend's house for a garage sale and saw a big bin full of wine corks. She asked, "What are you doing with these?" and her friend asked, "Why? Do you want them? You can just take them, bin and all." Free corks! A zillion of them! (A zillion means too many for me to count.) She was excited to tell me about them and offered her husband's services to make and paint the wooden forms for the corks. When all was said and done, he made eight forms for me at $5 a piece and two for her as she wanted to make one for her and one for her daughter-in-law. We set the date of the Saturday of President's Day Weekend for our joint venture and decided we would do it at her house, while our husbands would enjoy a day up in the mountains together doing guy things. And in my mind everything was awesome, because I was getting such a head start on Christmas for this year. The first three trivets I was going to make were for the Bethel Valley Girls. I was so PROUD of myself, but as one of them said to me after 'The Incident,' "You know, Firstelle, pride cometh before a fall." And that is exactly how it all played out.
Finally the day arrived, and Charlene (her real name) had her dining room table covered with a pad and butcher paper. I asked for an extension cord so I could plug my hot glue gun in to the nearest outlet. She said we should skip the glue gun and use Gorilla Glue instead. She described it as 'the best thing to use.' I said no, I thought my hot glue gun would be better, and in fact I had spent $12 buying new glue sticks for the two of us to use. But she insisted, and off she went to the store to buy me my own bottle of Gorilla Glue just like hers. While she was gone I worked on getting the corks sorted and organized and set up five of the trivets. The small bottle of Gorilla Glue was $12. At this point I had $52 invested in my Christmas craft project.
The sorting and organizing actually took several hours, and then we stopped and had lunch before we set out to glue the corks in place inside the trivet forms. I was still hesitating about the Gorilla Glue but then said okay, one try, see how it goes. Charlene did mention, "They say to wear gloves, but I never do." I took this to mean she had worked with Gorilla Glue before and was an old pro at it. And so we began. The first thing I noticed was how long it was taking to do the gluing, and then it became apparent that the corks were not sticking in place well at all. She looked at the directions on the bottle and said, "Oh, this says one of the surfaces should be wet down," to which I said, "Oh well, too late for that." We continued on, using a little bit more glue, hoping that would hold the corks in place.
When she had her two done and I had three done, we decided to take a break from our labor. She read the directions a little further and said we needed to put something heavy on top to help with the drying process, so she got out large, heavy, beautiful travel books to do the trick. Then we went in the kitchen, just as our husbands arrived back at the house. After visiting with them for a time, Charlene went in to her dining room to check on our projects. The first hint that something was wrong was when she picked up a book and the trivet raised up with it. On further investigation, she was horrified. "They're GROWING!" she cried out, and then, "You better come and see this!"
I will just interject that when he saw what had happened, my husband took the bottle of Gorilla Glue and read the directions to himself. Then he read them to us and asked us if we had not read them before we started, because the directions clearly state that Gorilla Glue grows to four times its size! It was growing, that's for sure, and it was oozing out the top as well as the bottle of the trivets, covering the special corks I had lovingly chosen for my BVG Sisters. Horrified, Charlene got wet rags for us to try washing the glue off the corks. (Of course first we had to separate them from the books....what a mess!) When that wasn't working, I rushed mine out to the sink and started digging the corks out with my hands, thinking I might be able to salvage them that way. No way! I only managed to get the ugly, frothing yellow gunk all over my hands, particularly my right hand. Almost instantly the glue hardened on my hands, and within a very short time I could not bend my fingers at all. My right hand had a hard-shell yellow finish, and it was driving me absolutely insane that I could not get any of it off of me.
Because this story is so long, and because it still makes me nauseous, I will just say here that in the next few hours Charlene's husband tried to help me by 1) rinsing my hands with gasoline, and 2) rinsing my hands with paint thinner. This was done outside, and he told me to rub my hands together while he was doing this. I cannot begin to explain the horrendous feeling in my hands while doing that. This only made things worse. Getting more and more frantic, I soaked my hands in warm soapy water at their kitchen sink while my husband checked out solutions to my problem on the Internet. The only problem was there was no solution. The Gorilla Glue people said don't peel it off because you will pull off skin with it. At that point, I didn't care. We decided to try scrubbing with a pumice stone, and that did a tiny bit of good. After a few hours of this I was willing to get in our car and make the hour drive home, but it was hard because I didn't want to leave the comfort of the warm water. Once home, I began soaking my hands in warm soapy water at my bathroom sink. I began at 11 PM. I would soak, then scrub with pumice stone, then soak again, then rub with Aveeno Lotion, then soak, then peel off little patches of the Gorilla Glue---along with little patches of my skin.
I hate Gorilla Glue. There, I said it. I will never use it again. The other night I had the guts to try another trivet, and this time I used my hot glue gun. It worked perfectly. I love my hot glue gun. I'm trying to love Charlene again.
Over 250 wine corks were sacrificed that day. If the bottles of wine averaged $10, that's really $2,500 worth of wine! Right now I have two restaurants saving their corks for me, and some of my friends have given me their saved corks, perhaps out of pity. I don't tell this story much anymore. I think my friends are tired of hearing it, and I suppose in the grand scheme of things, 'The Incident' is not the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I'm still going to make a bunch of these trivets for Christmas presents this year, but way before Christmas, just a month from now, comes Charlene's birthday, and what do you think I'm giving her for her birthday? It's a bottle of something, but it's not wine...
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