a merry christmas craft tutorial!

I have wanted to do a tutorial for so long! at last I have found a simple yet effective Christmas craft that I want to share. It is super simple and if you want to make a few they are reasonably cheap!

Step 1: My bristle brush trees had a ugly white plastic base that I didn't want on top of my car. So I pulled it off and rolled up a little piece of brown felt to make the tree trunk and secured it with hot glue.

Step 2: Hot glue your tree to the roof of your car. Using bakers twine or string tie the tree to the car. I wrapped the string around the wheels and then secured the string to the bottom of the car with hot glue.

 Step 3: Set up a little scene and play with your little car for way too long!

Step 4: Place your car in the jar and add snow until it looks like just enough. Cut out a pretty piece of paper to cover the lid and screw the ring on.

Step 5: Place on the mantle, or on a bookshelf and enjoy!

I seriously LOVE these winter jars! I went crazy and made a ton of them, you can see from the pictures that I did a bunch of different things, but basically I used the steps above. These are so simple to make, it literally takes 5 minutes.

Some of my favorites...

I read that you can bleach these little trees so I tried and yes you can! It looks a little dingy white, but with a little dye can you imagine!? the little polar bear was from the small toy section in Michaels. I used an empty jar with water and a tablespoon or two of bleach to turn them white. I kept my eye on the trees and swirled them around in the water/bleach mixture until I liked the color. 

I love the cars and hunted through bags of cars at the thrift store looking for cars my friends and family have to give as gifts.

The tractor is my favourite one of all. This one is for me!

Yup, it's official I love these cars!

I will be keeping my eyes open all year long for knick knacks to put in winter scenes for next year. I will be keeping my eyes open for little gnomes, foxes, wolves, and tractors! I will also be looking for Mason type jars through the year too, I much prefer them to up-cycled jam and pickle jars.

This project came from a mish-mash of ideas that I was wanting to do. I originally had seen snow globe jars on Pinterest for putting gift cards in. I wanted to make those for the gift cards I am giving at Christmas but was nervous about putting expensive gift cards in water. Then I thought I would just make snow globes, but I heard that the green bristle trees I wanted to use lose their color in water so that wouldn't work either. (They do by the way, I tried before bleaching out the white one.) Still wanting to make a snow globe type thing I made these!

I am daydreaming about next winter already!

I really don't like it when bloggers won't tell you where they found their supplies. So here you go!

Mason Jars: Local thrift store (not Value Village) .30 cents each with lids.

Buffalo Snow: Michaels $2.99 with a 50% off coupon! one bag did all 11 jars, plus I still have some left.

Deer, Mushrooms .60 each, .20 each respectively, from Scoop and Save which is a cake decorating store. 

Bristle Trees- Michaels has packs of 22 trees and with 50% off coupon I paid $16.  

Paper- I had in my stash

Toy cars- local thrift store .25 cents

Depending on what you put in your jars, you can do this for under $4 a jar! Fantastic I say!