Today I'm bringing you a special Christmas DIY project in association with Victoria's Vintage and Able Skills. The idea is to come up with a DIY featuring home made, space saving decorations.
Every year, our family get together to do something creative at Christmas. This year we have made some handmade Christmas cards featuring gingerbread men and my youngest sister has previously made Christmas cakes and gingerbread houses.
Last year our family made a beautiful Lindt Tree table centrepiece for our Christmas table and evening buffet table. The idea was to be able to make a feature point on the Christmas table without taking up too much space, as you still want to be able to see your relatives on the other side (or maybe you don't...?) As you can see from the photo above, you can definitely still get lots of yummy Christmas food on the table too!
This is definitely something you want to think about making a few weeks in advance as you don't want to be frantically gluing chocolate on Christmas Eve! But once it's finished it really does look spectacular as a centrepiece for your Christmas table.
You will need:
A bucket or pot to use as a base
Plaster of paris
A piece of tube to use as your tree trunk
A polystyrene ball (we got ours from Hobbycraft)
A glue gun
Tissue paper (we chose red)
PVA Glue
Lots and lots of Lindt sweets!
Decorative ribbon
The first thing you will want to do is cut your tube to the desired length (if you've already bought one the right size then you wont need to do this, but we used an old piece of curtain pole so my Dad had to get handy with his tools to cut the right length!)
You'll then want to make up your Plaster of Paris (make sure you follow the instructions carefully) and pour the mixture into the bucket or pot that you are using as your base. While the mixture is still wet, you'll need to place your tube into the centre of the bucket (you need to get this right, as once this dries, it's not going to come out!). The Plaster of Paris takes 1-2 days to dry so whilst you're waiting you can do the next step.
Using the PVA glue and tissue paper, you cover the ball so you can't see the polystyrene underneath. We did two layers so it was definitely covered. We popped the ball into the airing cupboard overnight to let it dry properly. We used red tissue paper as we were doing a red theme but you can make it any colour you want. When all the sweets are stuck on you wont see it, but when they start to be eaten you will see the colour come through.
By now your Plaster of Paris should be set and you can use the bottom half of your tree. Next, you'll want to place your polystyrene ball onto the tube so it starts to look like a tree. We found it easier to put this on first so we could work out where all the sweets were going to go and could cover every part.
Next is the fun part...eating...I mean gluing the sweets! We have a couple of glue guns so two of us could place a blob of glue on each sweet and the other two could place them on the ball. We worked from the top downwards, covering each half until the whole ball was covered.
Lastly, we placed a little bit of ribbon underneath to cover the join of the ball to the tube, and scattered some loose sweets over the top of the bucket so you couldn't see the Plaster of Paris underneath...and voila...a festive, edible centrepiece!
I felt a little sad taking the first sweet off on Christmas day as it looked so lovely all complete!
I hope you've enjoyed this little festive DIY and have had some inspiration for your own Christmas table...let me know if you give this a go..I'd love to see some pictures!
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