Deck the Halls 3: The DIY Details

For the last couple of weeks I have been sharing with you some of our holiday decor.  One of my favorite parts about decorating for the winter holidays is that I feel like I am able to create some elements that we will use year after year (as opposed to Thanksgiving and others where the pumpkins, flowers, etc. just get trashed when you are done).
So, in addition to the excess of ornaments and wrapped presents (which you can check out here if you so please!), I have been hard at work DIYing some projects that will hopefully complement our holiday decor for many years to come.  All of these projects were super simple and affordable to create, so I hope you find some useful tidbits you can use too!
First up was my collection of Christmas trees.  Originally, I had just planned on doing a few in simple mason jars like these spotted on our tables.

But when I spotted a whole bag of  21 bottlebrush trees in different sizes at half off ($10 for all of them!!!), I scooped them up.  For those of you unfamiliar with bottlebrush trees, you can buy them at any craft store this time of the year (for the individual ones, I paid about $1 each).  When you buy them, they will be green and look something like this:
                                                      
I wanted mine to be more vintage and snowy, so I just soaked them in bleach/hot water combo for about 45 minutes.  That did the trick and stripped all the color away.  After drying them out overnight, I gave them a spray of snow paint (again, available at any craft store this time of year) and a sprinkling of glitter, and all of a sudden, I had a wintery tree scene!  Easy peasy, lemon squeezy (sorry, one of my former first grade sayings, but I couldn't resist!).

Even easier was our ribbon card holders.  Literally, I took some ribbon, used packaging tape to tape it securely to the inside of our kitchen cabinets, and attached some clothespins.  Um yeah, I'm almost a little embarrassed to call that a project.  Here's how they turned out (we need to start receiving some holiday cards to really fill them out!):

And last but not least was my favorite, but also most time-consuming, project: my felt tree.  I started with a Styrofoam cone from Michaels (I used the 9 inch one ) and about 9 pages of white felt. I traced2-inch circles on to my felt, cut them out, and then folded them in half and then half again (I had pictures of all this, but then our laptop died and I lost them, so I apologize!).  Once the circle is in fourths, just take a pin and place it through the pointy corner to attach it to the cone base.  Layer those all over the cone to fill it up, and when you're done, it should look something like this:

                                                  

While it was a bit time-consuming, it was definitely easy work, and I really like the end result.  Hopefully, we will use it for years to come (and maybe even add a few more trees in the future).  

So, that's all the holiday crafting I've been up to.  How about you guys?  Working on any holiday decor?  Or do you prefer the store-bought stuff?