Painted Nutcracker Christmas Ornaments
December 19, 2013
For the past two years I’ve made my Christmas ornaments - in 2011 my tree was a simple bare branch with some mirrors and home-made felt doves, and in 2012 I pulled out my mini tree and strung a pompom garland and added some white snowflakes. This year I decided to again use my mini tree (although I seriously considered getting myself an adult sized tree – maybe I can find one for a huge discount after Christmas?) and rummaged around my storage locker for my ornament collection which has been steadily growing over the years. I was going to take the easy route and skip the DIYing this year and simply use what I had, but where's the fun in that? All I needed was some inspiration.
One day I was roaming the aisles of my favourite craft store (aka Dollarama) when I spotted some plain wood nutcrackers in a couple of sizes and I knew what I was going to do. I bought a few packages in two sizes as well as a picture hanging kit and brought them home.
My first task was to attach hangers to the top of my nutcrackers. I used the eye screws from the picture hanging kit and screwed them into the top of each nutcracker after first drilling a pilot hole. That was honestly the hardest part of this project.
After adding some temporary string I took my nutcrackers for a swim. Doesn’t the Para Paints Furby Fuzz (PF63) look a little like the Caribbean sea? I could have used a small paintbrush to paint the nutcrackers, but it seemed easier to simply dunk them, and then use the brush to remove the extra paint. Once they were thoroughly coated I hung them up to dry using some chopsticks wedged under some cookbooks which I think was a rather ingenious solution to figuring out how to dry them without the nutcrackers touching anything and ruining the paint.
Once the nutcrackers were dry it was simply a matter of adding some silver string and then hanging them on my tree.
It turns out I rather massively overestimated the number of nutcrackers that could fit on my wee little tree – while I put them all on for this shot I think the tree is better suited to about half as many. I guess I should take that as a sign I really need to get a ‘grown-up’ tree for next Christmas.
As a member of Para Paints Blog Crew I was supplied the paint in this project free of charge.
6 comments
super cute!!! Gosh darn I love the Dollar store
ReplyDeleteGreat idea - I can't believe you found those guys at Dollarama! It would be fun to mix it up with a few different colours, but then you'd need an even bigger tree ;)
ReplyDeletePretty! I love them!
ReplyDeleteSometimes Dollarama gets the same stuff year after year - if I get a bigger tree I'll just go buy more nutcrackers ;) Or I could just repaint some of the ones I already have - It was a super easy crafting project, so it wouldn't take any time at all.
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful colour blue!! I can see you are thoroughly enjoying your Para paint! I knew you would LOVE it!
ReplyDeleteLove them! Love all your crafting projects, actually, but these are particularly adorable.
ReplyDelete