DIY Pinecone and Wood Slice Wreath Under $10

I'm so excited about how my new pine cone wreath turned out! It's classy, it's festive, and it's CHEAP... which is always a plus. :)

I was in desperate need of a new wreath. You see, I was using this terribly outdated, cheap-looking wreath that looked very tired. Then I moved. Guess what didn't make it to the new house... the old wreath! Hooray!!!

But anyone who's moved also knows that moving can get very expensive. Since my wallet is still recovering from this last move, I knew whatever I got would have to be super budget friendly.

I know I said it was a $10 wreath, but it was actually cheaper than that for me. Cool right?  When I realized I could make this wreath with stuff I had lying around, I was soooooo excited!

Want to know how much it actually cost me?

• Wreath Form: $1
  You can get them from Dollar Tree... or yard sales, or thrift stores, or....
• Wire and Wire Cutters: Free
  I had wire on hand, but you could also use the floral wire from the dollar store.
• Pine Cones: Free
  My sister's tree sheds amazingly large pine cones that were fabulous for this project. She was happy to have someone help clean up her yard too. ;)
• White Spray Paint: Free
  I just used the left over paint from another project. But the 99 cent white spray paint from Home Depot would more than do the job.
  
• Wood Slices: Free
  I cut up a branch that fell off a tree in the backyard. However, I've seen round wood slice gift tags in the dollar section at Target. They have chalkboard on one side, but if you turn them over they're blank. Perfect!
• Red Acrylic Paint and Paint Brush: Free
  The brush came from my crafting stash. The red paint was actually borrowed, and I hardly used any at all!
• Hot Glue Gun: FreeI already had it, of course.
• Hot Glue Sticks: $1
  I was out of glue, but the dollar store had my back. ;)

In the end, it actually only cost me a whopping $2. Yes, I said $2 whole dollars. If I had to go buy the supplies today it would cost me right around $10 bucks. So no matter how you look at it, this is a pretty inexpensive wreath.

Yessss!

So here's the low down on how to make your own charming pine cone wreath.

Supplies and Tools:

1. 14" wire wreath form
2. Wire
3. About 30 large pine cones 
4. White spray paint
5. 12 wood slices (or a branch and a saw)The dollar spot section at Target has a package of wood slice gift tags in a package of 6, which makes a great substitute if you don't want to cut your own slices. Just turn the chalkboard side over and you have a blank piece of wood!
   
6. Red acrylic paint 
7. Paint brush
8. Hot glue gun and glue sticks

Step 1: Lay It Out

I laid out my pine cones around the wreath frame just to make sure I had everything exactly where it looked best. I realized that my bigger pine cones looked better on the inside and my smaller pine cones did better around the outside edge.

Oh, and make sure your pine cones aren't too brittle. They won't stand up to the wiring (or the test of time for that matter).

*HERE'S A TIP: If your pine cones are closed up or wet, preheat your oven to 300 degrees Farenheit. Put your pine cones on a foil lined cookie sheet and set them in the oven. Some will dry out and bloom in 30 minutes. Others can take a couple hours, so just keep checking on them until they're done. Here are more detailed instructions on how to dry out, bloom and debug your pine cones.

Step 2: Get Wiring!

Stretch out a long piece of wire and cut it off. You want it long enough to wrap around the bottom portion of a couple pine cones and the wreath form.

I used 2-3 feet of wire at a time. Any more than that gets all tangled and messy.

Wrap part of the wire around the pine cone, then tie it onto the wreath form.

Tie another pine cone with the same wire keeping them good and snug, then back to the wreath form. When the wire gets too short to tie again, get another 2-3 feet piece of wire and repeat the process.

Don't worry about the straggler wire. And don't worry about wobbly pine cones either. We take care of those in the next step.

Just make sure the wire is good and snug.

Step 3: Glue That Baby

Now that you're done wiring those pine cones in place, it's time to make your final adjustments and glue them exactly where you want them to stay.

I turned my wreath face down and hot glued any piece touching the wreath form. That keeps them from wobbling. I also glued some of the pine cones to each other where there wasn't enough surface area touching the form. Just be careful not to get blobs in the front.

Then just twist up or cut any loose wires on the back of your wreath.

Step 4: Let It Snow

Get your can of white spray paint, shake it like a Polaroid picture, and spray your pine cones until they are as white as you like. I sprayed it from several angles to get them a little more on the white side.

It makes the pine cones look like they just got a fresh dusting of snow. So pretty!

Step 5: Add Your Berries

What berries? Oh yeah, you have to make them.

Get Your Wood Slices

If you're bought ready-made wood slices or ornaments, go ahead and skip to the painting.

If you're making your own, this is where you get out your saw and branch. My branch was about 2 inches in diameter.

Slice off about 12 rounds of wood. It doesn't matter how thick you cut them - mine were between 1/4 an inch to 3/4 an inch deep. You can sand them too if you like, but I prefer the rough look under the paint. :)

I did pick off the left over bark around the edges though. Most of it was falling off already.

Paint Them Red

When you're done, paint the middle of your wood slices red. I left a bit of the wood showing around the edges because I liked the look, but do what you like.

Attach 'Em

Just hot glue them wherever you want! I covered a few places where the pine cones broke or where there were huge globs of hot glue.

All Done?

If you wanted to cover the uglies in the back, you could always use some gray felt, but I was afraid that would make it feel more bulky and unnatural.

No felt for me, thank you. I love it exactly the way it is. (insert *eeks of glee* here)

Can I tell you how much I love it?! I just love it!! So fresh. So festive. So unique. I'm really enjoying the natural look with a bright pop of color. And to top it all off, it hangs easily from the wire wreath form. It's nice that I don't have to whip up some wire contraption to hang it up.

What do you think? Are you going to try it? I'd love to hear about your own DIY pine cone wreath in the comments below!

May your porches be merry and bright, and may all your pine cone wreaths be white! Heh, heh. :)

DIY Christmas Advent Chain Idea & Free Printable!

My family loves the DIY Christmas advent chain... but how do you make it look fantastic? My struggle is that it always looks like some scraggly chain that doesn't fit in with my Christmas decor.

So this year, I used cardstock that matches my home for the chain (as opposed to any old left over cardstock), then made a cute little printable to put in a frame (you can get it too... when you scroll to the bottom)! 

It hangs on the door from a ribbon on a wreath hanger. Then the kids can reach the loops, and it doesn't look like I just taped it to the wall... although I did just tape it to my picture frame. :)

Make your advent chain (many of us already know this tradition, but for those who don't: cut paper strips, write down the number of days until Christmas - one number per paper strip - then staple them in loops in order, and tear off each loop as you pass each day).

Now you need a place to hang it!

Get your picture frame and decide what size of the printable you want on the wall. My frame was square, and much bigger than an 8x10 - but my printer doesn't print any bigger than 8.5 x 11. So I chose a small square.

But my large picture frame needed a matte...

... so I framed my lime green Christmas wrapping paper! Then I added a blue border of cardstock and used my printable for the centerpiece of the picture.

However you choose to doll it up, frame your printable.

Next, hang it up! If you have wall space, great. If not, do as I did - find an empty door and grab your wreath hanger. Use a sturdy ribbon to hang the frame from the wreath hanger.

And last, tape the advent chain to the picture frame. The kids love it. I love it. Actually, my husband thought it looked fantastic too. And I can reuse it again and again. Yay!

In the spirit of giving, here is your free printable!

• free Christmas printable (square version) 
• free Christmas printable (8.5 x 11 size)

 And if you ask my daughter how long until Christmas, she'll tell you. Thanks to the advent chain. :)

Merry Christmas!!!
 -Jannie

Faux Wall

When you need a wall and can not have one put in, you get a little creative. 

So, I have this room that had a wall with a fireplace in the center.  It created a round-a-bout.  We could walk circles all day long.  But I had a problem.  I needed two separate rooms. I especially needed a wall.  We are renting this house, so doing demolition and an add on was not in the cards.... and is generally pricy.   I wanted something light weight, but substantial.  Then it hit me.  I could the use the concept of pipe and drape.  PVC pipe and cheep tab curtains I already had.  

Viola!

Family room side of the faux wall (There is a tiny dog under the black bench)

other side of wall (which is now my craft room)

We made the panels 8 feet high and put them in 3 sections.

.

 To attached the center sections together, "T" connecters were just the thing.

 For stability and making it a "wall", "u" brackets were screwed into the drywall.

This project is not time consuming and is very inexpensive.  Power tools are optional (but I like to use mine any chance I get!).  Now I can work on my projects without the rest of the house seeing all of my glorious mess.

-Tara

A Bouquet of Freshly Cut Hearts!

Here's a fun, easy craft idea you can do with your kids for Valentine's day... Make a bouquet of freshly cut hearts! Simply cut hearts out of differently colored and patterned papers, then make 2 slices in the centers.

Slide the hearts onto a skewering stick. Repeat until you have enough hearts and sticks to make a full bouquet. You can also tape together some of the skewers to make some hearts taller than others. We made several of each. You could also use popsicle sticks, or make a miniature bouquet with toothpicks.

Place them in a vase (if you stab the skewers into styrofoam and put it at the bottom of the vase, the hearts stay put, but it isn't necessary) and put them out on display! Add a little note from little hands, and you're done. :)

They could be used for your child's class valentine party, a teacher's gift - or in our case, a fun surprise for Daddy or Grandma. These are also a great little idea for simple home decorating.

Happy Valentine's Day y'all!

Pot Rack from Art?

YES!! 

Go to your favorite home decor store 

and buy 1-2 metal wall-art pieces.

If you buy two, bolt them together.  

Hang from "s" hooks and chain segments.

Make sure you use ceiling anchors for your eyebolts 

to secure them. 

Use more "s" hooks to hang the pots.

And Voila! 

POT RACK!!

I'd been wanting a pot rack since I moved in, but I couldn't find exactly the right one. I wanted a HUGE pot rack, but it seemed that all the the ones I could find were tiny. As you can see, I have a substantial island in my kitchen, and I needed a pot rack to match.

 So, the idea came to me that I needed to look beyond the kitchen to find my solution. And there it was... staring me in the face.

Wall Art = Pot Rack

I absolutely love it, and use it every day!

Little Girl's Mirror Makeover

I got this mirror from a friend... it was headed to the thrift store, but it needed rescuing! Besides, I knew a little girl that needed a mirror, and this was small enough that it would work for her.
 

I removed the ribbon - it was tired.

Then I hit up the dollar store. They sell these awesome giant flowers for a buck. So I bought 5. After I took them apart, they easily made 10 beautiful flowers. With the help of my friend the hot-glue-gun, the flowers were permanently attached to the frame.

But it needed a little *bLiNg* - so I bought some giant gems for the centers. At first, I was disappointed that the store didn't have round gems, but now I'm glad. The square middles offset all the roundness of the mirror and give it a spunkier look.

And tada! And my inexpensive little decoration got hung in her room.

 It was a fun little idea. Simple really. And I think it was a winner. :-)

~Jannie

Iced Pine Cones

I wanted a new Christmas decoration...but money is tight!. Here is an idea that I found in an old Country Living magazine. Paint pine cones.

The magazine said to spray paint the cones, but I tried that. What a flop. The paint was SUCKED into the wood and never seen again!

So, I decided I needed to clean out some old paint anyway AND I had one that reminded me of toothpaste. Since I was Not going to use it in my house, the toothpaste paint became the new icy blue color choice for my winter decoration. It looks icy fresh and winter-y!

So ....here's the scoop.

Tie a string to the top of the pine cone. Wind the string around a clothes line, or something hung up OUTSIDE over a tarp or cardboard. Dip the pine cone in the paint and let it drip dry.




When dry, tie a skinny ribbon around the first row of cone-stick-y-outie-parts. Then gather all the ribbons together at the top (tie a bow, knot, something!) and hang it.


Ta-dah! I love the way this "wreath" turned out.





--TARA

Tables... a decorative storage idea!

Looks like a table sitting there in the corner, right? Yeah, but it doesn't really have legs. In fact, it isn't actually a real table at all. That's just a stack of food storage buckets covered to look like a piece of furniture. If you look really hard, you might notice it... but nobody ever looks that hard. Trust me.

The idea is simple really...

Stack your storage items (I used buckets of wheat here, but I've used boxes, bins, just about anything stackable). If you're using a heavy storage item, put some cardboard down to protect the space around it - in this case, the wall, the carpet, and the pretty scrap of wood that's going to sit on top later.


Then just cover it! I used a bed sheet because I didnt have a beautiful table cloth large enough, and I really wanted this scrap wood to show... it already looked like a beautiful table top!

After trimming the cardboard that was sticking out underneath (which should have been trimmed before I finished putting the buckets down), I propped a chair in front of it. A pot of peacock feathers, a few pictures on top, and tada!

Can't really tell at first glance can ya?

This simple idea was a hit at college. Usually the boxes themselves wound up as the table top and the whole thing got a fabric cover. We used similar tables as night stands and sofa backers. Note this: if you're going to put lamps or other heavy items on top, make sure your box, bins, or whatever is strong and heavy enough to handle some good bumping around.

That's a Jannie-Original. Hope it helps you like it did me!