Wood slice Christmas decorations

Since moving back to the family farm, I haven't been able to do a lot of crafting.  I have, however, been finding all sorts of potential crafting materials!

Years ago, I had to drop what had been an annual Christmas tradition: hand making ornaments, for our tree and for gift giving.

This year, I've finally started this up again, collaborating with one of my daughters.

I've been pruning a lot of trees over the past two summers, plus cleaning up storm damage and taking out dead and dying trees.  Some of this, I've been setting aside specifically to use as crafting material in the future.

The wood slices I am using for these ornaments are from crab apple tree branches I pruned last year.  I cut some fairly thick discs and, little by little, sanded some of them smooth.  Since this is an experiment, for the most part, I started with only 4 slices.

I penciled in some sketches, in some places using the colours and shapes that were already in the wood in planning the designs.

I broke out my wood burning tools for the first time in ages.

Since I was out of practice, I started with the simplest design - the snowflake - and worked my way through.  I used the same wedge shaped tip for all of this, though I really should have changed tips for things like shading.  I wasn't too worried about the detail, though, because after the designs were burned in, I passed them on to my daughter to paint.  She questioned me on what I had in mind, which was mostly just using white to highlight details, but mostly, I just left it to her.

This is the result!

I love her use of the gold!

Once the paint was dry, I screwed in tiny eyelets.  At this point, we could just add wire hangers that we already have and call them done, or I might string on hanging cords and add other small decorative elements.

If it works out, I've got a whole bunch of apple wood slices just waiting to be sanded, to make more. :-)

Happy crafting!