Jingle Belle Round-Up and a Quick Little Tree Project

Above you see my stash of completed Jingle Belle Challenge cards for this year.  I am soooooooooooooo glad that I decided to do this again this year.  The way that things turned out health-wise, I would have been hard-pressed to get enough cards done if I had waited until this month.  I still need a few more and what I'll do is pick a couple of the easiest to recreate and do a few more of each of those and possibly a few more with some other goodies I have not yet had the chance to use.  I have a few certain cards picked out for certain people but for the most part, it will be up to HWNSNBP to choose a card, sign it from both of us and post it.  I've made it pretty easy for him with an Excel spreadsheet with all the names and addresses.  This way he gets to be a part of the process.

And, speaking of easy, here's a quick little project I finished this weekend.  It started with three tubes of small glittered ornaments that were in the clearance section of the Dollar Spot at Target post-Christmas last year.  I just fell in love with the colors and despite the fact that they were glittered (I do not particularly like working with glitter), I thought that they would make a splendid tree.  Getting my daughter to picture it was a little difficult.  She wasn't sure that I would have enough ornaments, but I made it work.

I started by using a pair of jewelry pliers to snap off the little hangers.  This was done because my first attempt at screwing those suckers into the styrofoam cone wasn't quite working out like I wanted (see the evidence of that fail at the bottom of the cone).  Talk about mess...........if I didn't do it just right with the right amount of pressure, they were shooting all over the room.  And I must admit that a couple of the cracked a bit, but not to worry, that wasn't going to show.

I painted the cone with some silver metallic acrylic paint and let it dry.  Then I got out my glue gun and glued them onto the cone.  I almost said randomly, but it wasn't done randomly.  There were five colors and I kept the same order for each row just moving them over a couple so the same colors were not together on each level.

Uh, yeah, well, it didn't quite look complete did it?   Maybe she was right and I should have gotten a few more of those tubes, after all they were only 25 cents each.  Hmmmm.....

A trip to Dollar Tree for some silver garland saved the day.  I snipped it into 2" pieces and then folded them and glued them between the ornaments.

Oh, yes, and the bottom, well there weren't quite enough ornaments to cover the whole cone (I know, I know, she really was right after all!) so, not wanting to cut off the ornamentless bottom, I wrapped more of the garland around the bottom giving it a sparkling silver base.

And here it is for the time being on the coffee table alongside a silver paper and glittered ornament I found in Walmart.

The total cost of the tree was less than $3 and I do like the way it turned out which made it a bonus for me even though it was not how I had pictured it in my head.  

Gotta run and finish those cards now!