Be sweet, go nuts with holiday decorations

If you read last week’s Craft Corner column, you know that we had some trouble with our project, a candy tree.

This week we had better luck. We were able to find the kind of candy we wanted, as well as some nuts to make a second tree.

The process for making candy and nut trees is very simple, but finding the right materials is a must.

For our first attempt, we tried using Hershey’s kisses and mini Reese’s peanut butter cups and, while these are wonderful candies, they create rather large gaps between pieces when glued to the tree base.

We tried to fill in the gaps with some wrapped candies, but the results were not at all what we had in mind.

To make a candy tree such as the one shown, purchase wrapped holiday hard candy of uniform size that will fit snugly together when glued to the base.

Begin by gluing candies in a curved row from the top of the base to the bottom, then glue another row close beside the first and repeat until you’ve covered the entire base.

Gluing the candies in a curved line with give the tree a swirl effect and will be easier to finish than using straight up-and-down rows.

To make a nut tree, choose nuts of choice and glue them onto the base in a random pattern.

Our nut tree has some gaps between the nuts, but not enough to worry about. We applied a layer of sparkle decoupage medium to add richness and a festive touch to the tree, and it helped to minimize the gaps at the same time.

If you want to fill in the gaps, use smaller nuts and seeds, or faux berries or leaves as desired.

Our second project for this week’s column is a nut and berry wreath. Again, the procedure is simple, but this one is quite time consuming, so give yourself an afternoon or evening to complete the wreath.

Beginning at the inside of the wreath base, glue nuts around the edge, then glue another row next to the first and so on until the entire base is covered.

To fill the gaps in our wreath, we used faux berries, which are available on picks of about 12 berries per pick.

Cut the berries off of the picks and glue them into the gaps as needed.

You can leave the wreath natural if you wish, but we decided to apply a layer of sparkle decoupage medium to add some luster.

To hang the wreath, you have several options: If you use a Styrofoam base, you can simply push the wreath onto a nail or hook and it should hold with no problem.

If you used a grass or hay wreath base, make a hanger out of wire and attach it to the back of the wreath by running the ends of the wire under the hay and back up and twisting off the ends so that they hold.

For both the Styrofoam and hay base wreaths, you can run a length of decorative ribbon through the center of the wreath and tie it into a bow at the top to form a hanger.

The cost for making either the tree or the wreath will depend on the materials you choose.

Some nuts are more expensive than others, as are the candies, and you’ll need quite a few faux berries to fill in the gaps.

We found faux berry picks on sale for about 49 cents per pick and used between two and three dozen picks.

Jonetta Coffin: jrocoffin@aol.com