A Mini Tree Make-Over

 

We had so many things we wanted to share with you during the Christmas season, but time always seems to get away from us, and we never get our posts up. Well until now, so even though this might be a Christmas project you could be crazy like us and display your trees all year round... so this idea is for you now or pin this for Christmas 2014. 

We did a mini makeover on this 30" green table top tree we picked up at one of our many visits to Homegoods over the past holiday season.

(btw Homegoods is one of our favorite spots to find all types of holiday trees)    

 Wish we had a shot of the tree base. Its base was in a brown burlap bag with foe fur wrapped around it...it was oh so UGLY.  So we had to look past that and focus on the tree. We liked the color, height and the branches were easy to bend. We have been looking for a natural looking tree to display our mini woodland collection and this one  fit the bill and for $14.99  how could we not.  At another outing to HG we picked up this pot with bark on it and was saving it for the right tree. Yay!!

How~To: When we removed the burlap from the tree we were left with a small square block of cement in a styrofoam base. We removed the styrofaom and left the cement block. Then we gathered some rocks and a small bucket of quick-setting cement. We added the rocks to bottom of the pot to level the tree. We put  tree in the pot then mixed the cement. We found using a plastic spoon made it easy to scoop and pack down.

 Once the cement was packed down and smoothed over with the back of the spoon we used a wet paper towel to wipe the pot edges before the cement hardens.

**Suggestion: Once the cement hardens in the pot it became rather heavy. We preferred this since we were using it as a display at the craft show and we wouldn't have to worry about it falling over. But if you are using it for your home decor you might want to add more rocks around the sides, so you use less cement. 

The cement should harden in less than a day. We added moss to cover the base and embellished with pine cones and cinnamon sticks to give it that woodland appeal.

See how a simple little make over can turn this little tree into a treasure. We are sure this tree will be hanging around our home well into the spring season. We can already see bunnies and eggs displayed on this beauty.

Share with us your own holiday tree projects or if you have one that needs a little sprucing up, send us a photo and maybe we can help.   info@swirlydesigns.com 

How-to: Heart Tree Topper

This project is for personal, non-commercial use.

We love decorating for Valentine’s Day and as you may know we might have a few mini trees (is six a few??) decked out here to celebrate love day. Now, we don't expect you to have six trees... three would be fine..but even if you only have one here is a simple how-to project you can do to create this sweet tree topper for your own Valentine’s tree.

Materials
• Paper Mache covered styrofoam heart (we found these at Micheal's for a buck)
• Red and pink craft pain
• Sliver Dresden trim (D Blumchen & Co.)
• 3/8" ribbon coral rose color
• 5/8" ribbon lite pink color
• silver tinsel
• Hot glue gun
• Scissors
• a bamboo skewer

Step 1.
Take your scissors and make a hole at the bottom of the heart big enough to fit on your tree branch.


Step 2.
Paint. We painted one side bright red and the other side pink, but you can create any color combination you feel fits your ornament color palette. It could be red and gold, silver and purple etc.). Don't worry about the edges where the two colors meet, you'll be covering it with trim.


Step 3.
To make it easier to paint your heart, insert your bamboo skewer.Easier to hold, plus when done you can insert it into a glass to let the paint dry.


Step 4.
Cut two pieces of each of your 3/8 and 5/8 color ribbon 22" inches long (this size could vary depending on the size of your tree. You want the ribbon long enough to be able to drape down your tree) Use a glue gun to glue the ribbon around bottom hole of the heart alternating colors.

Step 5.
Glue the silver Dresden trim around the edges of the heart where the two colors meet. Then glue a piece of tinsel around the base covering the end your ribbon.


There you have it....your Valentine Heart Tree Topper!


Insert your heart onto the top of one of your trees and drape your ribbon down the tree.




The heart can easily be switched around if you want the pink side.

How great does the bright red side workwith our silver tinsel tree? It just makes all the red "pop" on the tree.


The red side also works well with a pale pink tree if you want more of a contrast.


...or switch it around to make the whole tree in tones of pink.

Have fun... be creative... use your own imagination to create your own lovely Valentine heart tree topper!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Holiday wrap up = Studio clean up

What a whirl wind of a season it's been here at the studio. Juggling everything from our craft shows (we will blog about that soon) to fufilling our holiday ornament orders. We hope everyone who was able to order this year has received their ornaments by now. For anyone who missed out this year, one of our goals for 2011 is to start production earlier so we can have more ornaments available. Cross your fingers!

Now that the holiday season has ended here at the studio we sure could use some much needed RR ... but since we are crazy, that will just have to wait. Because these next few weeks our goal is to totally clean up and reorganize our studio....especially the studio closet (see above image). It's quite embarrassing actually to show you this picture. When we moved last Sept. we didn't have time to unpack everything so it just got shoved into the closet, and we only took out what was essential to creating our ornaments. What the closet really needs are functional shelving to handle all our materials and stuff. Granted we have only been in this house for a little over a year but still it's a major eye sore. Slowly we have been cleaning and organizing everything so eventually everything will have it's own place.


This bookshelf unit was the first thing we tackled. We really want to make this functional but also pleasing to look at, so we thought we would...


remove a few shelves and create holiday displays with the 13+ trees we have here in the studio all year round. Here is our red feather tree displaying some of our patriotic mini wind catchers.
(please excuse The Elf on the Shelf in the upper left corner...he's here for the holiday season keeping our 5 year old on his toes!)


This cool little egg tree was purchased last year and holds a few of our new and old Easter designs. We used a sheet of wrapping paper to line the back of the bookshelf to give it some color. On the pedestal is an early Christmas gift we picked up for ourselves at the SOWA Holiday Market we did a few weeks ago. It's an original Vintage by Crystal little Easter bunny figure.


This corner of the studio is our glitter/ paper puncher station. Everything is displayed so we can see it from across the room.


This section we still haven't cleaned up yet. We still have a lot of our Halloween pieces out and a lot of paper work to go through.

So that's a quick look at what we have been up to these last few days before Christmas. Our goal is to get this all done as soon as we can so we can photograph it before we have to take everything out again and start designing for Valentine's Day!!

Yes I know we are crazy!

Hope you all have a wonderfully crazy Holiday!

~Lianne & Paul

Sneak Peek....

Hello Spring, where have you been? We have been waiting for you to arrive for quite awhile now.

Today is the first day of Spring and we are working away here at the studio adding the final touches to our Spring collection. We hope to have the collection up by the beginning of next week.

Here is a sneak peak from our sketch book of the new collection. We have a nice mix of birds, bunnies and flowers to brighten up you spring time decor. Speaking of decor we are always looking for fun displays and trees to showcase our ornaments along with other pieces we pick for the season (we will post some pictures of our holiday finds in our next post). We have been admiring this egg shape tree from the Bethany Lowe spring collection for awhile and we finally managed to find it at bayberry cove, a great website filled with wonderful artisan licensed artwork for every occasion. It arrived in the mail last week and it is waiting for us to adorn it with our new spring and Easter designs. We think this tree is just eggcellent.