Button Ornament Christmas Tree

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After seeing Buddy & Buggy’s awesome 3 dimensional felt trees, I went in search of styrofoam cones {again with the styrofoam, I know…}  Lo and behold, I found some at our beloved City Star in Egaila.  I came home excited to cover them with felt, but when I spotted our star-shaped buttons in our crafting closet, a new project took shape.

While Miss G rested, I set out these items as a little invitation to create…  A styrofoam cone, some green acrylic paint, a paintbrush, the star buttons and some pretty ball topped pins.

Truthfully, it would have been better if the pins were a little shorter than they were (they were 1 1/2″ long), but they were what we had on hand, so we used them and were just extra careful when poking them through the thinner tip of the cone.  If I were buying pins just for this project, however, I’d probably go with something like these 1 1/16″ straight pins or these even shorter map pins.

To make the painting part of the project easier for Miss G, I temporarily stuck a food pick into the tip of the cone, just to give her something to hold onto while covering the surface with paint (something like a bamboo skewer would work too).

Then she got painting.  She was very particular about covering all of the white space and took her time to do so.

Because acrylic paint dries pretty quickly, our tree was nearly dry by the time we had removed G’s smock, washed hands, and wiped up a couple of little messes.  Not wanting to wait, we blasted the cone with my hair dryer to get rid of the few wet patches that remained, and then got started on adding our button ornaments.

Grae held each button up to the tree’s surface and carefully slipped a pin through each of the buttons’ holes.  Something I hadn’t anticipated about this project was the colour matching part – that was all Miss G.  I hadn’t realized it when I set out the materials, but the pins coordinated with the stars almost perfectly, save orange I think.

We left this project out on her work table for a few days, and Grae came back to it and added buttons to the tree as she pleased.

Today she requested a star for the top, so we used a toothpick sandwiched between two small craft foam stars and she inserted it where the food pick had been.  I’m not sure if she’s fully done with the project or not, but either way, I think it’s pretty adorable and she’s had fun making it so far!

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