Natural Christmas decorations: pine cone trees

My kitchen is covered in glitter, but that’s all part of crafting at this time of year isn’t it?!

We’ve already started our Christmas crafting with cute Pom Pom Pine Cones, and these gorgeous sparkly pine cone trees are our latest natural Christmas decorations project.

This is absolutely ideal for children of all ages; there are no fiddly bits and it’s a pretty simple craft.

We started off by choosing a nice selection of pine cones, to make different shapes and sizes of ‘tree’.  You could go on a nature hunt to find these, or they’re easy to pick up from craft suppliers online.

Once we’d chosen our pine cones, the kids got busy with the paint.  Make sure you protect surfaces and clothes before you start!

While the paint was still wet, we sprinkled glitter onto the pine cones; this avoided the need to add glue and worked really well.  You could of course build up different paint colours (dabs of white for snow would look great wouldn’t it?), and then use pva glue for the glitter at the end.

The paint was quite thick in places, so we let our pine cones dry overnight.

The next step was to create a base for each tree.  We used plaster of paris because we had some in the cupboard, but air drying clay would also work really well.

I mixed the powder with water to get the right consistency (two parts powder to one part water should be about right), then the kids helped dollop it onto a sheet of foil and press each pine cone into it.  I like the way the bases look like a little pile of snow.

Once the bases were dry, we glued on some sparkly gem decorations and our pine cone trees were finished.

What do you think?  I can’t wait to decorate our Christmas table with them.

If you’ve been making your own natural Christmas decorations I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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This post is linking up with the fab Kid-Made Christmas Decoration Series, run by the lovely Jen from The Mad House.  The series is running throughout November, with a fab new homemade Christmas decoration craft every day.  Pop over and check out all the brilliant ideas that are being shared! Yesterday Allie at Live Love Mess shared her fab Graham Cracker Gingerbread House, and today over at Blue Bear Wood Anthea has a lovely Christmas tree craft.