Craftmas Part Four: A Little Something Eggstra

The final piece of the holiday puzzle was what to hang on the tree. Since our dog seems to have a proclivity toward eating glass, I knew my ornaments needed to be shatterproof. I remembered some plastic Easter eggs that have been in my craft stash for years now. I don't even know where they came from originally, but I thought they would be a nice alternative to the glitter encrusted shatterproof ornaments I'd seen at the craft store. Because, seriously, why does everything have to have glitter on it? I picked up some silver spray paint while at the craft store, using my 50% off coupon. When I got home, I realized I'd probably need to use a primer to get the spray paint to properly adhere to the plastic, so back to the home improvement store I went. I grabbed a cardboard box, to contain any over-spray, and headed out to the driveway.

I sprayed the eggs with primer, waited for it to dry, rolled them over, sprayed again, waited some more, rolled again, sprayed again, waited, until finally they were well-coated with primer. Then I repeated that process with the silver paint.

Once the paint was completely dry a few days later, I pulled out the drill and the tiniest drill bit we have - 1/16" - and made a small hole in the bottom of each egg since I intend to hang them upside down in order to minimize their egg-ish appearance.

Then I grabbed a handful of paper clips and started making my hooks. I bent the inner loop downward, then used my flat-nose jewelry pliers to straighten out the small end, and finally used my round-nose jewelry pliers to make a tiny hook at the bottom. Each tiny hooked end was inserted into the tiny hole in an egg, and they were all done!

I started with four dozen eggs, but once I got about half of them all the tree, I was afraid any more would start to look a little overwhelming. So I placed the other half of the eggs in a big glass vase as a table decoration.

To fill the blank spaces on the tree and add some variety, I quickly converted some snowflake tins to ornaments as well, using more paper clips for hooks. My husband runs a small business and bought Amazon gift cards for their largest clients. However, he wanted to give them out with company swag, so I got to keep the tins! Happy days!

Well, it took me until December 24th, but I think our house is finally ready for Santa's arrival!

The keen observers among you may notice the tree topper is not quite the 8-pointed star I showed you how to make last weekend. Cute as it may have been, it just wasn't big enough for a tree topper on our 6-foot tree. So I made a 12-pointed star to replace it. I still only had 2-inch long wooden beads though, so the points aren't quite as pointy compared to its overall size, making it look more like a ball than a star, which I actually rather like.