Glittered paper cones! A Met Monday post!

I'm participating this week in Susan's Metamorphosis Monday at Between Naps on the Porch. If you've never visited her fabulous blog, you are missing a treat and need to hustle over there and check out all the eye candy. I know Susan personally...ok, I don't, but she did very kindly respond to several e-mails from me when we were working on our back porch. She is so sweet and very patiently answered all my goofy questions. I emailed her so many times that now I affectionately refer to myself as her "favorite stalker"..which I'm sure she wondered a few times if I was a stalker! But she answered each question and encouraged me to ask any others I came up with. I feel like I know her personally!

So, here's my before, during and after. I am always trying to think of something cute and inexpensive to use for Christmas decorations. I am also totally hooked on crafting with paper, and you know I love to glitter things. I have a white tree that I put in the kitchen and have done a lot of different things with it. But this year I wanted something really cute and vintagy and different..with no budget to work with.

But I did have a stash of Mod Podge, decorative scissors, glitter, tinsel, pipe cleaners..and a brand new Gooseberry Patch catalog. Hmmm...

I leafed through the catalog and tore out some pages that had images I really liked on them, then used a salad plate as a pattern to cut out some circles, some with regular scissors, some with decorative scissors...

Then I got out the Mod Podge and my handy dandy foam brush and coated both sides of the circles with the glue and formed them into cones. I crumpled up some aluminum foil to make "stands" to put the wet cones on to dry...

I coated them three times with Mod Podge, letting them dry between coats. This not only makes them sturdier, it gives them a nice shine.

Then I took the dried cones to the back porch and coated them one more time with the glue and glittered them with clear glitter. Sorry, I forgot to take pictures of this step. Then, I took sparkly pipe cleaners and made handles for all of them by hot gluing the ends onto the sides of the cones. Then I used silver tinsel and tiny little silver ornaments to embellish each cone. Each one is totally unique...

Here's a couple of close ups...

The Gooseberry Patch catalogs are just the perfect weight to make these cones. And, the hand drawn illustrations are just the right amount of vintage charm that I was looking for...and the price was certainly right! By the way, if you're not familar with this charming catalog, click on the link above and check it out. I love their cookbooks and have the entire collection of Christmas books, except for this year's. I'll be ordering it soon, no doubt!

By the way, each one of the cones started out the same size, but ended up shaped just a little bit differently..something about the way I folded them, I guess.

I also made some cones for the same tree that are a little less sparkly..but cute as button anyway. I used newspaper for these cones.

I love this one...it's my favorite. I cut a circle of lightweight card stock to study up the newspaper cones..they seemed a little flimsy, so I just glued the newspaper circle to the cardstock circle, then made the cone.

I am going to fill these cones with peppermints for the tree...cute, yes?

Only 47 days until Christmas! At least ONE of my trees will be ready!! Stick around...more paper cuties to come!

Later!

Cathy