Pinecone Ornaments

Our family Christmas tree is decorated with heirloom ornaments, snowmen collected over the years, woodland critters, and some handmade gems made by Adam when he was a little fella.  Every year we look forward to pulling them out of the Christmas box and trimming the tree together with a little Sufjan Stevens in the background.  I don't like my tree to look put together, I like it to look loved.  But to prevent it from looking chaotic I first pepper it with red bulbs and Swedish straw snowflakes, and we decorate around them. 

Sometimes, if we're lucky, we'll get a few pine cones on the tips of our Christmas tree which is usually a Norway pine. I love the way the cones look, textural and egg shaped.  I decided to add some more to the tree this year as another repetitive ornament.  This is one of those projects where instead of painting and gilding and gluing, I just kept it as is.  I picked up a bag of pine cones at the grocery store for a few dollars and screwed brass eye screws to the tops, removing the stem when necessary. 

Jasper and I used some of the pine cones to make a wire coat hanger mobile by tying a stick and some tree trimmings to the frame with twine, and hanging the ornaments at different lengths.  This would be a fun craft to do over the long winter break.

And here they are in our very well loved tree...