Pine Cone Christmas Trees

A couple of weeks back we had some family photos done with an amazing local photographer kikphotography.com.au.  While trekking around having pictures taken, my little ladies started to collect the pine cones that had fallen, my craft mind instantly knew we would be able to do something really cute with them this close to christmas, I just didn't know what yet.

Photo credit kikphotography.com.aa

After having the pine cones sitting on my kitchen bench for over a week we finally got around to doing something with them, we decided to turn them into mini free standing christmas trees!

First things first, we need to make that stands, the easiest thing I could think of was making them out of salt dough, but I would think the air drying clay would also work well.

To make Salt dough you need...

• 1 cup of cooking salt
• 2 cups of plain flour
• 3/4 a cup of water

Add all of the ingredient in a large mixing bowl and mix together well using a wooden spoon or your hand.  Once it is all mixed in, kneed the dough for a few minutes to make it as smooth as possible.

To make the bases for the pine cones...

Roll out the dough to just under a centimetre in thickness, use a cookie cutter or glass that is just bigger than the widest part of your pine cone to cut out as many bases as you need.

To assemble the trees...

Take a pine cone and gently press it in to the salt dough base.  Leave it to dry, this took a couple of days on the kitchen bench, usually when making things with salt dough I pop then in the oven for a few hours on 60 degrees C, but I wasn't game to do this with pine cones attracted!

After a couple days of drying out, it was time to paint, we painted our trees green, but I think for those of us that have white Christmases and not scorching hot ones like here in Australia, white trees would be super cute.  We painted the bases sliver, and then covered the whole thing in a light coat of silver glitter paint.

They are now a happy little addition to our Christmas display for 2015!