Pinecone Bows! Using Nature's Poop to Bring Pretty to Presents

December 13, 2011 by Karen 40 Comments

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Wondering if you can make bows out of pinecones; nature's poop? Wonder no more because yes you can make bows out of pinecones. Here are a few tips.

3 months ago I sat straight up in bed and said "Pinecone bows" out loud. It wasn't the weirdest thing I'd ever done in bed, but it was up there. So I got out of bed, walked over to the desk and wrote down "Pinecone Bows" on an old Jumbo Video receipt. Yeah. That old.

I kept that little Jumbo Video receipt to remind me that when the time came (the time being Christmas) I should make some bows out of some hot glue, 4x6 index cards, twine and acorns. No, no. Pinecones.

The pinecone bows are in keeping with the whole chicken/farmy Christmas theme I've got going. The rustic sort of, I live in the woods and have squirrels for pets kind of feeling.

My original plan was just to hot glue pine cones onto index cards until they were in the shape of a bow.

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But when I actually did that, I wasn't in love with it. It basically looked like pinecone poop. So I added a bit of reindeer moss here and there. Now it looked like pinecone poop with reindeer moss, which obviously is a huge improvement but still not acceptable. So ... I continued screwing around with the pinecones and the twine.

I just kept gluing and twining and cutting until I came up with a design that worked.

What ended up working the best was a design that combined rustic and a bit of modern. All you do is hot glue a pinecone or two onto an index card then glue twine around them to act like a frame. Cut away the leftover index card and you're done.

Like with hotdogs, if one is good, two is better.

I improved the original pinecone bow by just making it more natural looking. A few pinecones laying in a bed of moss. I picked this reindeer moss from a very remote and difficult to get to spot at the cottage, picked the bugs and twigs out, transported it home and then preserved it myself using this method I have a tutorial on. I have no intention of giving this bow away. I'm either going to sit it on the windowsill or wear it as a hat on Christmas Eve.

Take a look at how these bows turn out looking on presents wrapped in craft paper and recycled feed bags!

It just occurred to me ... all the stuff used to make these bows are from the Dollar Store. Pinecones, hot glue sticks, twine and index cards. The reindeer moss isn't. We've been over that.