DIY: Festive Acorns

We had the best acorn tree in our neighborhood in Cincinnati and I loved collecting these giant, perfect acorns. For a couple of years I’ve had a large baggie filled with acorns for fall/winter decorating, but I decided they needed a little something to liven them up. Of course I painted them. Now doing a DIY on painting acorns seems a little obvious but it was surprisingly a little tricky so here are my step-by-step pictures and some pointers for you.

Start by gathering your acorns and paint. You’ll also need hot glue or another craft glue for attaching the tops and bottoms. Most of the tops of my acorns had come off (despite gluing them on a couple years ago) which was great, I wanted the bottoms to be painted while keeping the tops au natural.

The tricky part was the actual painting. I ended up using a long straight pin and sticking it through one of the little holes in the bottom of the acorn. It might take a couple tries but in the end I eventually found a place to securely stick each pin so we could hold the pin and paint the acorn. Holding them with our fingers proved too messy and too time consuming by the time you went back and touched up all the spots where the paint got rubbed off. *Note: I did most of these by myself, in the evening when the kiddos were asleep. This was more time consuming than I thought and while my little assistant was happy to help it was still a long process. I could not have done this easily with a little one at my feet.

Most of the acorns would sit on the unpainted bottom side to dry. Of course not all acorns complied and there were several that needed touching up or second coats of paint.

For fun we also tried dipping some acorns and painting some of the tops while leaving the bottoms natural.

Then you match up the bottoms with the tops,

Put hot glue in the top,

Add acorn and press.

Ta-da! I like how they turned out. And while they’re a little late for the Fall train, I think they’re bright and festive enough to keep out during the holidays.

Add them to a clear vase or even a few in a little bowl and you’ve got a festive little decoration. You could get crazy with adding polka dots, stripes or (heaven help me) chevrons.

Hip, hip hooray for making ugly nature things pretty!

(joke)

*please forgive my weird formatting…I’ve been having issues with blogger for a while now and I’m not sure why. If anyone has any pointers I’m all ears!