Easy Christmas Decoration Tutorial 2 - Animals

Hello lovelies!

I'm very excited to tell you about my second Christmas Craft; it's even easier than the first one (felt snowflakes, if you haven't seen it yet), but perhaps a little less traditional.... This is also the "after" of an upcycle project I mentioned in an earlier post.

I recently stumbled across this tutorial, which I'd favourited last year on my old blog. I loved the colourful glittery finish used on the animals in the original tutorial, but as I've decided to go for a grown up white-and-red colour scheme for my tree this year, I used pure white acrylic paint instead. I can always cover them in glitter next Christmas :)

You will need: 
Acrylic paint in colour of your choice (or spray paint, if you prefer)
Paint brush
Plastic animals. You can get them from the Early Learning Centre, or pick up a bargain job lot on ebay like I did. 
Little picture hooks (I used these)

Tutorial:

First things first; assess your animal. Analyse it like you're working on the "circle of shame" page of a trashy celeb magazine- and work out where it's carrying the most weight. You need to know this so you can screw the hanging loop into the pivotal point so the animal hangs evenly- instead of looking like it's about to face-plant the bauble below it. 

If you're less practiced at critiquing thigh sizes than I am you can hold a loop of thread around the animal's middle and move it until the animal hangs nicely. 

Once you've found the tipping point on your animal, screw a picture hook into its back. 

Because goats are clearly the sixth* most Christmassy animal

Then paint it all over. My animals needed several coats to fully cover the previous colour. I went for plain white, but you could do stripes, spots, animal print (but on the wrong animal- who doesn't want to see a leopard-print chicken?!), or even something like this; 

Image courtesy of A Subtle Revelry (who have uploaded a tutorial for these glittery, tassled wonders too, the lovely things)

Here are mine in all their monochrome glory;

Mr T modelling one of my other new decorations- a ridiculous giant "diamond" bauble. I am planned to turn it into equally ridiculous jewellery the minute the tree comes down.

All I need now is some candy-cane striped bakers twine to tie them onto our tree, and handily I'm going to IKEA on Thursday instead of going to work (my work know about this- I'm not that rebellious) so I can buy some of this and probably a ton of other useless crap really useful Christmas-related bargains. 

Have you ever made any Christmas decorations? I'd love to see- please do add links below :)

Katie xxx

*Top 5 Christmassy Animals: 
1. Reindeer 
2. Robin 
3. Donkey 
4. Penguin
5. Frog in a Santa hat. Closely beating Cat in a Santa Hat.