For one of my Michaels craft submissions I made a BEA-utiful and sparkly pine cone candle holder. The three mystery items for that week were as follows 1-Pine-cones 2-Candles 3-Glitter!!!! I mulled over ideas for a while I knew everyone would probably try and make some sort of centerpiece so I tried to shake it up a bit. I perused some online pine-cone crafts, and found one that looked like a topiary, whala I found my jumping off point. I decided to make the color scheme monochromatic using only white and red, of course as you can see I failed my 2 toned color scheme and snuck some green in there, oh well anything to be pretty.
Here is a list of supplies I used Pine cones,white acrylic paint, crystal and peridot glitter By Martha Stewart, Hot Glue, Glue gun. Tacky spray. 3 2 1/2"Foam Balls, 1 8" foam disk, 1 12x12 piece green paper, 1 12x12 green and white stripe paper. 2 3/8" dowels, 3 taper candles, 2 sprays of red berries, 3 sprays tiny green berries, green sparkly ribbon 1" wide, 2 large green leaves, 1 pine spray.
I started out the day before painting the pine-cones white, using a solution of 3 parts water to 1 part acrylic paint. mix well and dunk the pine cones into the solution shake off the excess paint and leave to dry on newspaper. the next day or after they were completely dried I took the foam balls and hollowed out a hole for the candles, I then glued the pine cones to the foam balls with hot glue. This process takes a while I had 2 glue guns going to speed things up.
I covered the ball leaving the bottom open as you can see to accomodate the dowel, and because you can't tell that the very bottom is covered. After I was done I glittered everything. Using Tacky spray I liberally covered the pinecone balls. I brought them indoors and sprinkled as much of the crystal glitter as would stick, over a newspaper of course to catch the excess. Using the same method I glittered the tiny green berries, the large leaves and the pine spray with the peridot glitter. I made 3 tiny bows and 1 large bow with the green ribbon and set aside.
Next I cut the wood dowels into 7" 4" 2" lengths and inserted the dowels into the bottom of the foam balls. I took the dowels out of the balls and filled the holes with lots of hot glue then reinserted the dowels. Next I traced a circle around the foam disk onto the green paper I cut out the circle and glued it to the top of the disk using the tacky spray. I then cut 2, 1 1/4" strips of striped paper and glued them to the circumference of the foam disk using hot glue. I eyeballed
the placement of the dowels and made a mark where I wanted them to go on the disk. I inserted the dowels then removed them again to fill the hole with hot glue to reinforce the dowel. Once the glue was set I continued decorating the topiaries by filling in the spaces between pinecones with clusters of red and green berries. I took the green pine sprig and glued it to the base then I glued the 2 large leaves on either side on top of the pine sprig. next I layered 2 berry sprays over the leaves. last I finished off the center of the spray with the large bow. I inserted the candles and glued on the tiny bows at the base of the candles. Whew done!!! just make sure if your burning the candles not to let them get too low, the centerpiece is NOT flameproof!!
