You don't need much money to craft Thanksgiving heirloom treasures from recycled egg cartons and cotton batting. All it takes is a bit of imagination, glue and confidence to shape and paste cotton batting pumpkins like these. My miniature pumpkin ornaments are also hollow so that I can include a small token, scripture or money gift inside of each of them for my guests and family members.
From October through November I decorate my Blessing Tree with small delicate ornaments like these little cotton batting pumpkins.
Left, a finished cotton batting pumpkin. It's hollow so that I may add a message.
Right, Here you can see it hanging from a very delicate branch. Cotton batting
ornaments are very light weight!
Supply List:
egg cartons
white cotton balls
white school glue
thin wire
scissors
pencil
acrylic paints: red, orange, yellow, white, gold and green
Step-by-Step Instructions:
Cut dome shapes from paper egg cartons to use in this Thanksgiving Tree craft. You will need two dome shapes per pumpkin.
Glue the two halves together to shape a round pumpkin. Use tacky glue for this process and also add a bit of white cotton around the seam to give it strength. Brush the surface again with white glue and then let these forms dry over night.
Cut out a shape at the top of each pumpkin with a small pair of very sharp scissors. I cut out a cross shape at the top of my pumpkins.
Now you will need to roll in the palms of your hands some log-like shapes from your cotton batting in order to form the ribs of your pumpkins. Pinch down on either side of the log shapes to taper off the ribs at both the top and the bottom of the pumpkin. Glue these to the sides of your egg carton shapes. Let them dry.
Now brush on a layer of white glue and let this dry.
Pull of more cotton from your cotton balls and gently add this with another coat of glue to the surface of your pumpkin in order to shape a final layer of the batting. Let this dry.
Add a final coat of white glue and stick a pencil into the bottom half of your pumpkin. Pushing and twisting gently in order to give the pumpkin a more organic shape.
Glue a whole clove into this indention and let the pumpkin dry.
Now you may paint the surface of your pumpkin using gold, orange and red acrylic paints. I mix these together roughly while applying paint to the surface of my ornament. Paint the crevices with darker shades and the ribs with lighter ones.
Take your sharp scissor points and make two small hole on either side of the opening at the top of the pumpkin.
Insert a cotton coated wire and shape a handle. Paint this handle green to mimic a "vine."
I will insert a scripture in each of my hollow pumpkins for every guest I treat this year. I've listed a few popular blessing scriptures below.
Egg cartons make excellent craft material.
Left, I've cut out the cup shapes of an egg carton in order to shape my miniature pumpkins. Middle, Glue two of the egg cups together to form a hollow pumpkin shell. Cut a hole at the top so that you can insert a little treat, gift or message inside the pumpkin shell. Right, Glue a thin layer of cotton batting around the seam to conceal it and make your ornament stronger.
In these photos you can see how I shaped the cotton batting to form an organic looking pumpkin. A small clove is glued to the bottom of each miniature shell where the blossom end would normally be on a real pumpkin.
Here I have added handles to each pumpkin so that these may be hung from my Blessing Tree.
I used acrylic paints to color these old fashioned, hand sculpted ornaments.
Just a Few Blessing Scriptures to Include Inside The Pumpkin Ornaments: NIV versions
Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the
contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you
may inherit a blessing. 1 Peter 3:9
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called
children of God. Matthew 5:9
Whoever gives
heed to instruction prospers, and blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord. Proverbs: 16:20
A good man
brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man
brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks
what the heart is full of. Luke 6:45
Blessed are
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Matthew 5:6
But to you
who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Luke 6:27-28
Taste and
see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. Psalms 34:8
Worship the
Lord your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take
away sickness from among you. Exodus 23:25
When my kids were very young, my husband and I lived in San Francisco. On weekends we would go to the beach for long walks and then splurge on a few hot ciders at a local market in Half Moon Bay. Occasionally I would find an interesting piece of driftwood on the beach and if it was small enough, I'd take it home and make good use of it.
One Christmas I painted a small piece of driftwood like a Belznickle and wrapped it up for my husband. Although it was a strange ornament it didn't look out of place on our tree, which was decked out entirely with Belznickes.
My younger child absconded it for her own collected memories and she now hangs him on her tree every year.
Driftwood is wood that has been washed onto a shore or beach of a
sea, lake, or river by the action of winds, tides or waves. It is a form
of marine debris or tidewrack. Above you can view the front, up close
and back of my hand painted driftwood Santa.
"A fun DIY video, how to build a driftwood Christmas tree . . I will post the full step by step tutorial on my blog (tomorrow Dec 16th) with more details and a link to buying the tree we made for this video. visit, http:// debisdesigndiary.com..If you enjoyed this video subscribe to my youtube channel for more DIY tutorials, I post new videos regularly to youtube!
You can also find me on Facebook Facebook.com/debisdesigndiary" Here is the video DIY of the cute beach ball ornament Debi made.
I painted these faux stained glass baubles approximately ten years ago. I used some specialized products to achieve this unusual stained glass effect. The Gallery Glass® products have been around for a long time. If you can not find them in a shop near you, you can visit the company online and order the supplies yourself. I've included a link to their website below with one of their videos.
Supply list:
A colorful selection of Gallery Glass® Window Color: pearly white, red and blue
I used Gallery Glass Redi-Lead Strips (thin black)
acrylic silver paint
large clear glass baubles
a china marker or grease pencil
X Acto knife
Step-by-Step Instructions:
Clean the surfaces of your glass baubles to insure maximum contact with the Redi-Lead Strips. Use Windex or vinegar and let the glass ornament dry.
Draw a design on your glass bauble using a china marker or grease pencil. You won't see these marks because your going to cover them up with the Redi-Lead Strips.
Apply the Redi-Lead Strips on top of your lines made with the china marker to create a simple pattern. These strips stick but can be moved around for a few seconds before the tacky surface dries. I cut my strips into clean, precise angles using an X Acto knife as I laid them onto the glass surface.
You may choose to use Gallery Glass Liquid instead. This liquid version of "leading" is more difficult to use on baubles, however.
Use Gallery Glass® Window Colors to fill in the spaces between your designs.
I painted the lead stripping using a silver acrylic paint on my glass baubles, but you can leave the black color if you wish.
Sequin ornaments like this little snare drum are becoming very popular among ornament collectors. I often find them tossed into plastic baggies and sold in bunches at garage sales. If you aren't lucky enough to find the real vintage ones, you can make them yourself. I've included directions below for those of you who can manage to purchase the polystyrene or Styrofoam drum shapes on the web. This little drum shape is not as easy to find in hobby or craft shops anymore.
Supply List:
2 inch diameter and 1 1/2 inch tall Polystyrene shaped drums or Drum-shaped Styrofoam pieces
8mm diameter cup sequins: red, green and white
red, green and white seed beads
star sequins
flat head pins
tacky white glue
white pipe cleaner or chenille stem
gold beads
1/2 yard of gold ribbon for trim
thin gold twine
Step-by-Step Directions:
Before pinning your drum, you will need to mark diagonal lines with a soft pencil on the side of your Styrofoam drum. Also leave a strip of space at both the top and the bottom of the side edges unpinned. The width of these strips should be the same as the gold ribbon you will be using to trim the edges of your drum.
Thread one seed bead onto your pin and then also a sequin of the same color. Touch the tip of each pin with a bit of white glue as you pin to hold your work in place after the glue dries.
Next pin four rows of red sequins following the diagonal pencil marks. Follow these four rows with four rows of white, then green sequins.
Use a bit of tacky glue to adhere the gold ribbon around the top and bottom edges of the drum's sides.
Pin gold beads through the gold trim allowing approximately 1/2 inch between each bead.
Twist the gold twine gently around each gold bead, there should be ten of these at the top and ten at the bottom. Look at the photos above and below to visualize this chris-cross pattern made by the twine.
Cut and pin a little loop for one end of the drum to hang a hook from.
Bend a white pipe cleaner 2 1/2 inches long in half and pin this down on top of the drum with a small piece of gold trim. Glue on a gold bead to each end of this pipe cleaner. This stem mimics the drum sticks for your sequin snare drum.
Pin a few seed beads plus starry sequins to both the top and the bottom of your Styrofoam drum and add a wire for hanging this little vintage drum.
Different angles of a small sequin snare drum made in the 1950s or 1960s for the Christmas tree.
I pasted cotton batting balls to the top of my chenille stem figures and then
added a variety of tiny trims to finish my Santa and snowman ornaments: a tiny
bottle brush wreath, red ribbon, a small cotton batting top hat and a few
red winter berries.
Traditional chenille stem figures were wrapped with Bump Chenille stems. Each stem had and still does have four "bumps" per wire. You can make one character with one piece of Bumpy Chenille just like the vintage ones sold in old catalogs or on ebay. Most craft or hobby shops carry Bump Chenille but if you can not find it in a shop, search the internet and order it ahead of time for this easy old-fashioned, vintage craft.
Step-by-Step photos of twisting a chenille stem figure.
Directions:
Cut one bumpy piece of chenille stem with two bumps and a second piece with only one. The two bumps will be the legs of your tiny armature and the single bump with be the arms.
Position the single bump in the center of the double cut bump wire and then twist the double cut bump wire around the arms to shape the body. (shown above)
Now your ready to paste on a tiny bead or picture for a head.
Twist the tips of your arms where the hands of your figure would obviously be to hold tiny bottle brush trees, a miniature sack of toys, a tiny candy cane etc...
These light weight ornaments are perfectly suited to hang for a feather tree or you can even decorate a package with them.
These tiny Bump Chenille stem figures will be hung from my feather tree for Christmas.
My strawberry millinery fruits are ready hang on the Christmas tree.
This Fruity Turban, 1917
Millinery fruits have always been popular ornamentation on both ladies hats and on Christmas trees. The word millinery refers to the designing and manufacture of hats.
Millinery is sold to women, men and children, though some definitions limit the term to women's hats.
Historically, milliners, typically female shopkeepers, produced or
imported an inventory of garments for men, women, and children,
including hats, shirts, cloaks, shifts, caps, neckerchiefs, and
undergarments, and sold these garments in their millinery shop.
The origin of the term is likely the Middle English milener, an inhabitant of Milan or one who deals in items from this Italian city known for its fashion and clothing.
Decorating with fruit themes during Christmas was quite typical of Early American Colonists. You can learn how the colonists decorated with pyramids or fruit cones for their Christmas dinner parties at history.org as well.
Several years ago I purchased some inexpensive milliner fruits to "upcycle" into something special for my Christmas tree.
I will have a collection of fruit themed ornaments on the tree nearest to my dinning room this year. You may use any fruit you like for the simple ornament craft below but I have elected to make clusters of strawberries for my tree. This is not only because of their red color but also because the strawberry is somewhat reminiscent of German glass, mouth-blown, strawberry ornaments of which I have always been fond of.
Left, a couple of plastic canisters of inexpensive millinery strawberries. Center, I have wrapped the stems of two or three strawberries together with wire and tape. Then is wrapped the wire "stems" with cotton batting. Right, I have shaped the wire into hooks for hanging the millinery fruit clusters on my Christmas tree.
Supply List:
millinery fruits, your choice
wire for wrapping the stems into hooks
cotton balls
green acrylic paint
white glue
glitter, your favorite
permanent black felt pen
Step-by-Step Instructions:
Purchase millinery fruits from your local resale shops or hobby stores.
I chose to wire two or three strawberries together to create a cluster of berries to hang from the branches of my Christmas tree.
Then I covered the wired stems with white glue and cotton and painted these green. Let the stems dry thoroughly.
Make sure the surfaces of the fruits are clean before adding painted or inked details. I used a permanent black felt pen to draw seeds onto the surfaces of my strawberries.
Dab on a generous application of white glue with the tip of your finger or a brush.
I then rolled the millinery fruit in the glitter and allowed these surfaces to dry before hanging them on the tree.
More Millinery Inspired Ornaments for The Christmas Tree:
Carmen Miranda wore millinery fruit like no one else! She was in fact, a milliner by trade before being discovered by Josue de Barros. She eventually became a successful samba singer, dancer and Broadway actress during the 1930s -1950s.
Hot glue a wooden bead to the top of a Rigatoni piece of pasta. The Rigatoni will act as the torso of the angel, the wooden bead will be her head.
Glue one piece of macaroni to each side of the torso to act as arms.
Now hot glue the inverted tack on top of the angels arms to act as the candle in a holder.
Next, glue on a Bow Tie pasta piece between the angel's shoulder blades on the back side of her torso; this pasta is her wings.
The last gluing step involves adding enough glue to the top and sides of the wooden bead to make the hair. Use some tiny shapes of Minute Pasta or white rice for this step.
Let the tiny Pasta figures dry and snip off any stray glue strands that are not attractive. Hot glue leaves some of these while you work.
Choose a warm dry place to work so that the painted pasta angels will dry quickly between coats of spray painting. Make sure that this environment is well ventilated. Read the instructions on the label of spray can carefully. Wear a disposable paper mask while you are working to limit the amount of fumes that you inhale while working.
Line the bottom of the box where you will be spray painting the angels with wax paper or tin foil so that the painted pasta ornaments do not stick the surface in which they are lying on as they dry.
It is important to spray paint within the interior of a box so that the spray paint does not land upon other surfaces that you do not intend to paint during the process.
Turn the pasta angels and spray them lightly in layers as they dry.
Hot glue a fancy ribbon to the tip of the angel's head or to the back of your angel's wings.
