Guest Designer | A Piece of Life's Pie

Craftin’ Up the Holidays on a Dime

Posted on November 28, 2012 by apieceoflifespie

I have the honor and privilege to be invited as a guest designer for Decorate to Celebrate today! I love this challenge blog and it is full of such amazing inspirations. To be a part of the inspiration team is such a “pie al a mode” moment for me. Thank you Amy and Decorate to Celebrate for this wonderful opportunity!

The challenge is to make something in the scope of home, party or table decor that revolves around celebrating the Holidays, using paper crafting (Hanukkah, Christmas, New Years, etc.). I am a total Christmas fanatic and have been wanting to start decorating my house since before Thanksgiving, but thankfully crafting Holiday cheer during that time staved off my need and allowed Mr. Tom Turkey to shine instead. Be sure to head over to Decorate to Celebrate and get see the other amazing creative ideas and LINK up your great Holiday project!

What I decided to make is an inspiration from the pages of the Holiday Crate and Barrel catalog I saw this idea last year and again this year and just had to tackle it. It can be used as a center piece for a holiday table or just a fantastic decor added to an end table or sofa table. Thankfully, the hubs has an elaborate workshop in the garage so I have access to to pull this off – under the watchful and teachable eyes of course. I think he is getting nervous that I may be expanding my crafting space into his workshop soon. 🙂

How To:

I started with going to Home Depot and gathering up two sticks of 1/2 inch trim and 1/4 inch dowels (in the baseboard and crown molding department). After doing a quick and dirty calculation I came up with the sizes I wanted and cut the 1/2 trim down to the sizes I needed.

Large Tree:

Long sticks: (roughly) 17 1/4 inches,
Short stick 11 1/4 inches,
Tree base cut down from a 3/4 inch thick block to 6 x 2.5 inches

Small Tree:

Long sticks : 12 3/4 inches x 8 3/4 inches
Tree base cut down from a 3/4 thick block to 4.5 x 2.5 inches

Once all pieces were cut down, I sanded down the rough edges and glued together with wood glue using clamps on each corner of the trees so they would set firmly and dry overnight.

Once dried, I released the clamps and sanded down any glue that may have leaked out due to the pressure of the clamps. I mixed up some epoxy and with the help of the hubs cut down the dowels to fit in the cavity of the trees and quickly and I do mean quickly adhered the dowels to the tree. BOY DOES THAT EPOXY DRY FAST!

After that, I wrapped a piece of wire around the peak and hung from a tree branch so I could paint them. I used Rust-Olemum Textured Metallic spray paint and painted it with about 4 coats (I should have had a layer of primer first; live and learn). Regardless,I loved the sparkle this paint gives off.

In between coats, I fired up my Silhouette and ordered two different 3-D ornaments for .99 each. Using Bo Bunny’s North Pole designer paper (needs to be two sided designer paper), I cut out various sized ornaments. These are a little tricky to put together- need more patience than talent :-). But once I got the hang of it, the assembly went faster. These don’t need any adhesive and I found a tutorial on putting together a round 3-D paper craft from the designer of these ornaments that I was able to crossover for making these. Once they were assembled, I added ornament hooks and cut them down to size using wire cutters.

Note: You can use glass or plastic ornaments as well.

Ornament Cuts:

Ball Ornaments

Large : 6.25 x 6.0
Medium: 5.22 x 5.0
Small: 4.20 x 4.0

Long Skinny Ornaments

Large: 6.0 x 4.91
Small: 4.77 x 3.85

This project was very fun to make and it was a great way to incorporate some creative time with the hubs as well. I am thankful he likes to guide me in learning new things, even if it may mean he may be woken out of a dead sleep hearing his chop saw or scroll saw hard at work in the middle of the night (that is when most of my crafting gets done). Also this project cost about $20 to make and you can’t beat that!

Thanks for sharing a piece of ” you can make what you want on a dime” pie with me! And be sure to head on over to Decorate to Celebrate by clicking HERE to join the party!

Linking Up To: