Well it’s official: the Christmas prep has started in our house 🙂
We’ve been having fun with some Christmas-themed nature craft, making these natural Christmas decorations from pine cones and pom poms. Is there any limit to the crafting potential of pine cones?!
I do love homemade Christmas decorations; they’re so full of personal meaning, and a great way to spend some fun time crafting with the kids. Every year our Christmas tree becomes more and more a tree of lovely family memories. At such a hectic time of year, I find that a bit of leisurely crafting really helps prevent the mounting excitement spilling over into all-out mayhem too!
These pom pom pine cones were so quick and easy to make. We used pine cones, mini pom poms (which you can buy from craft stores), and some natural string, plus a hot glue gun for sticking on the pom poms.
As there’s a hot glue gun involved, I would absolutely recommend that an adult does the gluing part for younger children. My eldest is nine and loved doing it himself though.
A little tip to avoid lots of stringy glue flying all over the place: after you’ve added your dot of glue, lightly scrape the glue gun nozzle over the edge of the pine cone scale as you move it away, this helps to limit the mess.
Once the glue had dried, we simply knotted a length of string around the top of each pine cone, then tied it into a large loop. Here are our finished decorations.
Aren’t they great? The kids went for the multicoloured pom pom look, but I also think they’d look brilliant with a single colour all over. You could easily add some glitter glue as well to make them sparkle.
Have you got any suggestions for natural homemade Christmas decorations? Do share them with me in the comments, and look out for some more Christmas-themed nature craft over the next few weeks.
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RachelSwirl says
November 22, 2016 at 10:06 amOh they look fab we may have to give them a go.
Catherine says
November 22, 2016 at 2:43 pmThey were really easy and not very messy, I can highly recommend!
Linda aka Crafty Gardener says
November 23, 2016 at 8:15 pmThese are cute ornaments. I made almost the same ornaments many years ago with our girls but used beads instead. They sparkled on the tree.
Catherine says
November 24, 2016 at 9:26 amAh I bet beads looked fantastic! I suspect we’ll be making more of these, thanks for that idea.
Claire says
November 26, 2016 at 2:47 pmI love these. So bright and colourful. My children are too little for glue guns yet though. We do have a bunch of pine cones waiting to be made festive.
Catherine says
November 27, 2016 at 4:12 pmWe’ve also been painting pine cones with pva glue (or poster paint) and adding lots of glitter – definitely safer for little ones and lots of fun!
Catherine says
November 27, 2016 at 4:13 pmI love the bright colours too – can’t wait to hang them on the tree when it goes up 🙂