#Make Jingle Bell Star Christmas Tree Topper

Hey y’all,

It’s the weekend! Woop! I’m a little bit excited about a weekend of fun Christmas projects… can you tell?

So there’s just over a week left until Christmas (exciting times) which if you’re anything like us will mean you’re starting to get just a little bit concerned about the ever growing pre-Christmas to do list.

Earlier this week Sam and I decided it was time to get a little organised and so have posted our to do list onto the wall in our hallway, and it currently runs to about 4 sides of A4 paper :S . But fear not, this doesn’t mean we are entrenched in a woeful pile of stress, we just love Christmas so much and have so many fun Christmas projects we want to finish.

We’ve had a pretty full on week crafting and baking away but not really had any time to post what we’ve been up to in between so before we got carried away with our new weekend projects, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you one of the handmade Christmas projects we finished up earlier in the week.

Last year we made a super cute angel for the top of our tree, which you can see here, but sadly she didn’t really survive the process of packing away our Christmas decorations and being unpacked again this year. So we knew we needed to make something special to crown our tree this year (and be a little more careful with it than we were with our poor angel).

It’s always a tough one deciding what should live at the top of your Christmas tree but since we had a bit of an angel mishap in our past we thought maybe it was time to try out a jingle bell star for for top of the tree.

Now I certainly can’t take any credit for the idea behind this one, Sam has been eyeing up jingle bell related craft projects for a while. Since shops started stocking Christmas tree decorations this year Sam has whizzed me around displays pointing out the features of each decoration and sharing what feature of each one she had planned for our star.

So how does one make their very own jingle bell star Christmas tree topper?

You will need:

Some thick florist’s wire

Some thin florist’s wire

150 jingle bells

A pen and piece of paper

1) Shaping up - Sketch out the shape for your star on a piece of paper to use as a template to bend the wire around. If you are super confident you could probably just eyeball it, but we decided that life would be much easier if we had a star drawn on a piece of paper to bend our thick wire around. Just bending the wire to match our sketch we had something looking quite good and star like pretty quickly. Once we had a star shape we coiled together the ends to hold everything together and then snipped off the excess, making sure to leave a decent length of wire to help attach it to the tree.

 2) Wiring up the bells - In order to attach the bells to our star first we need to string them up onto our thin wire, to make a very jingly garland, looping on every one of our 150 bells.

3) Jingle all the way - Starting at the base, loop the string of bells round and around the star shape, passing the string in and out in a spiral. To make sure the star held its shape we made sure to add an extra turn on the wire at each corner before moving on and looping the string of bells around the next point on the star.

4) Repeat - Repeat many many times over, looping the string of jingle bells around your wire star frame until your star is completely covered in bells.

5) Tie off - Once your star is completely jingled, simply coil the end of the wire around the frame 3 or 4 times to tie it off and snip off the excess with some scissors or wire cutters.

6) Tree time - Finally it’s time to top your tree with your new amazing jingle bell Christmas tree topper. Woop! Just use the excess thick wire we left at the base of the star in step 1 to coil around the top of the tree and fix your jingle bell awesomeness in place.

Right I think I can cross another thing off our Christmas to do list, time for some hot cocoa and bed me thinks Have you guys got any exciting Christmas projects planned this weekend?