SPOOKY TREES

Once your branches are painted it's time to make the pots to hold the SPOOKY TREE. Being cheap and deciding it was a good way to recycle we grabbed the clean cottage cheese/yogurt containers from the tupperware cupboard and got to work.
To paint them we used black acrylic paint. Now, for a nicer tree I would use a clay pot. We did that with the one that is sitting in our living room. The clay sticks beautifully to clay, while it chips easily from food grade plastic. So be gentle with your pots once they are painted.



Paint the outside and half of the inside. (It was a beautiful day so we did all of our work outside. And the cool, dry air and bright sunshine had things dry in record time.)Once your pots are painted spray them with the gloss finishing spray you used on the painted branches. This gives everything a nice shiny look and helps the paint wear a little better. Then put the branch in the pot and fill the pot with the rocks you've gathered to hold the tree upright and help weight the base. You could use sand or plaster we just happen to have a lot of rocks around here and they were the easiest and cleanest thing we could find.

I was out of spray paint or I would have painted the tops of the rocks black too. We did that with our fancy spooky tree and it looks more polished. But... oh well. Since we were going to take these trees to some of Henry's friends we wanted them to be more than rocks, old cottage cheese containers and a branch and so we added CANDY. Candy makes ever gift better right? To make the candy ornaments we broke into the Halloween candy stash and picked the cheap little halloween chocolates because they had the best wrappers, though any small wrapped candy would probably work. To hang the candy I cut small pieces of thin orange and black ribbon and used my hot glue gun to attach the ribbons. (which I was just happy I knew where it was since I've used in oh, maybe once in the 6 years I've owned it.) Then we hung the candy on the trees and voila! Spooky trees! Oh and I put some halloween scrapbook paper around the pot to relieve the blackness of the whole thing. Anyway, it was really fun to make spooky trees with Henry and he was so proud of himself when he took them to his friends. We'll probably make these every halloween. After all, lots of fun for the price of a can of spray paint. Happy Halloween ya'll!