Wood Slice Toadstool Tree Decoration.

 I am really chuffed with how these little decorations have turned out ........

Made using wood slices (5 - 6cm) from Temu that cost £1.34 for a pack of 10 and the silicon mould that was £1.38 (but with Temu the prices are constantly changing, so it's always worth shopping round before actually buying anything).

I started by making a pile of toadstools using white Crayola Model Magic.

I left them for a week to dry out thoroughly and because it was around the time I needed to sort out a new blog (say no more). They dried without any cracks and with very few causalities, but any of these would be easy to patch up and disguise when glued to a flat surface.

In the meantime, I put grass on the front of the wood slices using a generous sprinkle of an ultra fine, green glitter and PVA glue to stick it down, after first checking that the mushrooms would actually fit the slices.

I then gave the toadstool caps two good coats of a red acrylic paint, leaving the stems unpainted ........

...... before sticking them onto the wood slices using Hard as Nails for a really secure fix.

I used white, Dovecraft 3D Enamel Effects for the spots on the caps to give a little extra dimension and that's when they started to come together.

However, the stems at this stage looked a little too bright ..........

...... so I sort of smudged them with a very light brown Whisper pen, I wasn't sure about this at first, but when I started varnishing the decorations it really made a lovely subtle difference, making the toadstools look much more realistic.

In all I gave the whole front of the decorations four coats of varnish ..........

...... with very pleasing results, they almost looked ceramic.

To fill in some of the empty space I added clusters of three, tiny, clear, flat backed gems here and there to add a little magic to the overall effect.  Finally I put a small eye hook screw in the top to hang the decorations from.

I understand that toadstools are very en trend at the moment and as I have another couple of moulds I have yet to use (also from Temu) I guess you'll be seeing quite a few other ideas using them over the next few months, so watch this space!