Gone Nutty



Hand painted acorns with their caps hot glued back on!  



Hi, my name is Betsy and I am a Pinterest addict!  If I admit to this right off the bat then maybe you will understand this project.... at least this is what I am going with. 

I love to scroll through Pinterest with my morning coffee and in doing so this summer I saw some beautiful painted acorns.  I decided this little project looked easy enough and I would just find me a few acorns and try that!  

Well, who knew this would be months and months of an outright obsession.  Yikes! 

So true confession time, as much as I love nature, finding acorns was not as easy as I thought it would be. Early in the fall I wandered over to Mendon Ponds Park and walked the woods looking for acorns.  Nada, zip, nothing! I looked for oak trees and then looked down thinking they would just be littered on the ground, right?! Wrong.  I guess I was too early because when I looked up on the tree were these microscopic acorns that looked just too small to do anything with.  This meant a visit to Mendon Ponds every week to check on the budding acorns to see if they had gotten bigger.  I must have been looking at the wrong trees!  Then one day I went to Mt. Hope Cemetery and found  some wonderful old oak trees, but the acorns had fallen a few days previously and it had rained and they were taking root already.  Silly me thought the acorns fell from the trees and just lay there all nicely put together with their caps on waiting patiently for some crafty nut like me to wander by and scoop them up.  Wrong again!  Discouraged, but not one to give up, as I taxi'd my kids around town to their sporting events I would look for oak trees.  Finally I hit the mother load!  In Mendon Ponds park on a quiet road I found an enormous oak tree that was raining acorns one day.  Literally I would stand there and these juicy beautiful acorns would just fall from the tree all around me.  First their bodies, then their caps...and if I was lucky, sometimes both together!  I scooped up what I could and then went home to get reinforcements.

Jack gathers up acorns for his kooky mother!

So beautiful!  I love the ones that are connected at the caps!

We filled two Wegman's bags full.

More help arrived to wash them and sort them.

Enlisting the help of the young and "better sighted" to paint these beauties.

Hand painting was fun, therapeutic and a nice little social activity (that's my wine - not the teen girls pictured) but it was tedious and took many coats to get a deep color.  I decided to spray paint the buggers and mass produce them.  I had Chris make a contraption to set the acorns on so I could spray dozens of them at a time.  This worked like a charm!!!  I just had to be careful putting the acorn bodies on the nails so I wasn't crucified in the proceess.

Acorn torture - on the rack!!!



Pretty colors in a silver leaf bowl for my co-worker!

Okay, yes, once I got going it was just necessary to see how they looked in all kids of colors and finishes.  And then finding pretty dishes at the local Goodwill so I could display them and give them to friends...  Hi, my name is Betsy and I have an acorn addiction along with my Pinterest addition...  Whatever!!!  They are so cute!

Christmas red for the Holidays.

My rabbits look good next to them.

But my favorites were the ones that I simply sprayed with a clear acrylic spray.

With this project, that took over my dining room for weeks (okay, maybe longer), I learned that next year I will bake these acorns at a low temperature in the oven to fully dry them out.  After a few weeks some of them cracked and crinkled and the paint peeled off and I think it is because there is so much moisture in these living organisms.  

Acorns found little places around my house to add color.

Then admittedly I got a little nuttier and made some into punkin' heads!  

....and sculpey snowmen with acorn caps.

The acorns have been put away for the season (yes they got somewhat moldy because I didn't properly dry them first)... but next  year I am going to try this again and keep it to a Saturday afternoon project instead of having it take over my dining room for a few months.  I swear!