Tutorial: How to Dry Acorns

   I was on Pinterest looking at fall decorations and found many pins that used acorns. I tried to figure out where to get acorns, yes outside did not occur to me at first. I looked online and at craft stores and they cost quite a bit for how few you get. Then I realized you can get them on the ground for free. My mother in law was great enough to share some of the ones she had gotten for me to work with.

Now that I had my acorns I had to figure out how to make them last forever, well longer than one season. There were only a couple tutorials out here on the blog world and they said different things. So I did what I do best and combined them with what I thought made sense.

   The first thing you need to do is make sure the dirt is off of them and no bugs are on them and none have holes that may mean a bug is in them. If they are green let them sit out and dry until they are all brown. Spread them out on a cookie sheet and set your oven to 200 and let them ‘bake’ for about an hour. Now when you take them out be sure and not shake the pan too much the tops of most of them have popped off at this point and the closer they are to the bottoms the easier your life will be. Let them cool completely.

   Now that they are cooled and any possibility of a living thing is dead you are ready to attach all those tops back on. Now I could say this isn’t that bad, but at some points it sure felt like it was going to take forever.  Really though it’s not awful and once you get going, you get a rhythm to it and it goes sort of quickly.  Just take the bottoms and try and find a top that fits and doesn’t look too weird on it. Hot glue them together and that one is done. Now I would like to mention that you might as well pop off the tops of the ones that didn’t do it on their own and glue them on, this way when you are using them year after year they don’t start popping off. These are a bit easier because you know which go together.

Here is where I started.

and that is only about half the pan

Here I was about 45 minutes into it.

Where I started to feel it would never end.

Here are the two different types of acorns I had, I found it interesting.

I really liked the squatty ones, they had a
different pattern on their tops too.

Here is what I was left with.

Not bad for matching them all

Here are my finished ones.

   The next day I had my wonderful hubby help me spray them with a sealant to make them shinny and last longer. Make sure they are not on the cookie sheet you use because I’m pretty sure it’s not food safe.  I just used a clear Valspar sealant.

I used them around my tablescape that I showed you last week.

I also used them on my coffee table decorations and in the bathroom on a cute little leaf dish.

 

I love my B towel just wanted to
show it off :)

  My original plan was to paint the bottoms of each one in a few different colors, but after gluing them all one by one together I had had plenty personal time with them. You could spray some of them in a color paint to add some accent to your decorations or even do what I had planned, but I really liked the natural color of them with the sheen that the sealant gave them.

   How are you decorating for fall? Have you tried to work with acorns before? I would love to hear from you about how you decorate.  Have a wonderful weekend.