Tag Archives: chenille pipe cleaner

finished pinecones

Christmas Advent 2015 – Day 11 Chenille Pinecones

Day 11! Today I made some pine cones out of chenille pipe cleaners. Specifically, I made them out of chenille bump stems in a lovely light brown color.

Materials:

  • Chenille bump stems (brown)
  • Large wooden beads
  • Felt (brown)
  • Scissors
  • Tacky Glue
  • Superglue

individual layers of pine cone scales

First, I made leaflets with the chenille stems as shown above to create layers of pine cone scales. Next, I glued a bead on the underside of one layer and glued another layer to the bead, as show below, using tacky glue. This can take a little bit of time as you want to let the tacky glue dry really well before you add another layer of leaflets.

how I glued the layers together with a wooden bead

I was working on three at once, so I kept them all in a neat pile with their corresponding beads.

layers glued together and beads I used

I will say that the wooden beads in the middle of the picture worked the best. Made a nice sturdy and pretty pine cone.

felt pieces cut and pasted for top layer of scales

Then, I cut individual scales from the felt to make the tops of the pine cones. I glued these with the tacky glue into sets of three. I put 6-7 of these trios on each pine cone. I put  I also cut 1/4″ x 3/4″ strips of felt in the same color and glued them into rolls to make the stems of the pine cones.

finished pine cones stacked on top of each other

You can see above where I glued the stems to the top of the pine cones and then added the felt leaflets around the stem.

Once everything had dried, I them touched up all the connecting points with super glue to make sure that everything would stay together and form a strong bond. At this point, you could easily add a tree hook to the top and hang them from the tree. That would look really nice. I have another purpose for these that you will see in about a week.

Happy Crafting!

Kristin

Christmas tree ornament made of chenille pipe cleaners.

Ornament Advent: Day 19 Chenille Tree

I knew from the beginning that I would just have to make a tree ornament for this Christmas advent. I have had one in mind, but I had no idea to execute it. I watched Loryn’s and Cheri’s tree ornaments get posted and loved each of them. My goal was to keep the ornament very simple and easy to make. This whole ornament probably took me about 30 minutes and I was Google Talking (can I use that that way?) with Mom which slows me down as we each share what we are project we are working on.

Christmas tree ornament made of chenille pipe cleaners.

I used chenille pipe cleaners, cut in half, then wrapped candy cane style for the form of my tree. I know I keep mentioning temari lately, but I have a ton of supplies leftover and so I used some really cool fuzzy green thread from my temari stash to wrap around the chenille pipe cleaners. I really liked how the fuzzy thread looks like the needles on a pine tree. I tied the ends of the thread and glued my knots to ensure that they wouldn’t come loose.

Christmas tree ornament made of pipe cleaners.

I grabbed all the thread wrapped pipe cleaners in one group. ran some silver wire down the middle, and approximately 1″ in on the pipe cleaners, wrapped the silver wire around the group to hold it together. Then I bent all the wires down over the silver wrapping so that just the wire stuck out the top. I used this bit of wire to string the wooden star bead and make the loop for the hanger. At this point, it you didn’t put the hanger on the ornament, it actually looks really cool just as a decoration for your table, although I would recommend putting something under it as the pipe cleaners are a bit scratchy.

Ornament hook made to look like a Christmas tree.

I love the hanger I made for this ornament. Whoever said that you needed to have plain hooks for your ornaments? I made the hanger out of more silver wire, just bending it into shape and curling the end so you didn’t poke yourself with it.

Ornament hook made of wire to look like a Christmas tree.

Happy crafting!

Kristin