My Mom loves Christmas decorations and holiday craft
fairs. It’s been increasingly more
difficult for us to find birthday gifts for her. Since I’ve been Pinteresting and crafting a
lot, I found some inspiration and made her Christmas decorations from mussel
shells that we saved from our Spanish inspired dinner. It was actually quite easy. The hardest part was finding time to go
through the process of putting everything together. It’s a good thing I started
early.
I first let the shells air dry for a couple of weeks on a
sheet pan in the garage. I could have
left them for a couple days and they would have been ready, but I didn’t have
time to do anything with them for a few weeks.
After they were fully dried out, I was able to pull the feet off the
shell with no problem. I then boiled the
shells and scrubbed them down. I boiled
them a second time with a good scrubbing for good measure and put them back out
to dry. A few weeks later, I lay them on
a tarp and sprayed them with a clear spray paint. I saw on Pinterest (I’m hooked) that you can
spray shells and they will remain wet looking so that their opally insides are
shinny all the time. A week later, I finally
got to assembling the mussel shell Christmas trees. This could have all been done in a week or
two (with drying time), but it took me almost two months because I didn’t have
time to sit down to do anything. I still
need to make my mom a third tree, but need to find time to put it together.
2 comments:
Hello! I'm just starting to make this for Christmas - I'm making one oyster and one mussel tree (or that's the plan!) I was wondering what spray you used to get that shiny look, whether there's any other way to do it than spraying (painting instead?) and what glue you used to stick the shells to the cone? Thanks!!
Hi,
I used a standard high gloss clear spray paint.
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