Today I have something a little different for you. We have an annual Finnish beauty blogger advent calendar where a “door” opens in a different blog every day till Christmas eve and today was my turn. For this year I decided to do some Christmas ornaments/decorations using pine cones and nail polish.
On previous years I’ve always done nail art so this year I wanted to do something different. Lately I’ve gotten interested in crafts and DIY projects. So cos of that I collected a lot of pine cones this fall. I washed the pine cones and put them on a towel to get the extra water to drip off of them. After that I moved them on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper and put the sheet into about 200 F degrees oven to dry until they were completely open. After that the pine cones where ready to be stored to wait for an inspiration to hit me.
I made a white pine cone wreath with them and as I was painting that wreath with vintage chalk paint I got an idea to test how nail polish would look on the pine cones.
The pine cones I got are pretty small so I didn’t end up using a whole bottle of polish just to paint one pine cone. It actually took less polish than I thought to paint them. The trick is to choose the well pigmented ones that give you full coverage on one coat. I have so many bottles of nail polish that I’ll never be able to use them all, even if I tried. So I didn’t feel bad “wasting” some of them on a project like this.
As I was picking the polishes I wanted to use for this I found a half dry one too. Not good for nails anymore but was still able to use it for this. I also had a red polish that stained my nails so I wasn’t going to use that again. Perfect for pine cones though :D
I painted the pine cones all over so they are painted no matter what direction you look at them from and I tried to get good coverage with the polish. First I painted the top side of the pine cone and let it dry. When it was dry enough to be handled without making a mess I turned it around and painted the other side. On some of them I used more than one polish and added glitter polishes for extra sparkle.
They turned out to be beautiful, unique decorations. It was fun to think about different polish and glitter combinations and I like how they also show my love for nail polish. These will make me happy next year too :)
You can use your nail polish painted pine cones in many different ways. You can put them on a pretty plate, on a glass bowl with little lights to show the sparkle or you can place them on your dinner table centerpiece with other Christmas decorations. You can glue a small ribbon on them and hang them from your Christmas tree. There’s a lot of possibilities. Do one thing with them this year and something else next Christmas.
If you don’t celebrate Christmas you could paint your pine cones with winter-y colors and enjoy them till spring :)
I can still find pine cones from the ground here in Finland. They are tightly closed and frozen but after a wash and oven drying they will be beautiful and wide open like these ones :)
How do you like these? Are you going to try and make your own nail polish painted pine cones now?
♥ HAPPY HOLIDAYS ♥
Ok, this is such a fantastic idea! My mom always used pinecones to decorate the house growing up. I don’t know how she never did this.
Thanks! Pine cones can be used in such many ways :) I’m glad I thought of this one cos these ended up looking great :D
These pinecones are beautiful! Can’t believe you did these with polish!
Thank you :)
That’s a brilliant idea!!!! It’s beautiful! Do the holos dry holo on the pine cone?
Thanks :) I tried holo polishes too. Unfortunately the holo didn’t really show at all on the pine cones. If you looked carefully it was there but not enough to really be pretty. I don’t know if it would’ve showed better with more than one coat of polish but I didn’t want to waste the polishes by trying. So I just layered some glitter on them for extra sparkle :)
Wow, these look storebought! How much polish did you end up using for each one? I want to do this but I don’t want to use up too much of my pretties.
Thank you :) It depended on how pigmented the polish was. But I don’t think it was more than 1 – 2 ml out of the 15 ml bottle at most. I only did one coat and these weren’t super big pine cones. I used a lot of the white, textured polish but I think it was cos it had dried up all thick and gooey in the bottle.