Turn old spice mills into playful nutcracker decorations
Turn your thrifted spice mills into the season’s most playful decorations. Festive colors and that grimacing stare are all part of the charm.
Nutcracker decoration supplies
- a wooden spice mill
- acrylic paints
- a foam dauber
- one small and one larger paintbrush
- acrylic markers (in different colors) and fine-tip paint markers (black and gold)
- gold cardstock
- decorative ribbons
- white merino wool
- small wooden beads (sand into half spheres)
- sandpaper
- hot glue
- scissors
Nutcracker decoration instructions:
1. Lightly sand the mill and dab on white acrylic paint as a primer to get the final shades to pop. It helps to remove the mill’s top to make painting easier. Darker mills benefit from two coats of primer for full coverage.
2. Once the primer is dry, sketch and draw the clothing outlines on the mill with a paint marker. If your first try isn’t quite right, draw new lines over the top and cover the earlier marks with paint later.
3. Remove the mill’s rotating top and paint it in your chosen skin tone (here, a mix of white, orange, and brown). Sand the wooden bead for the nose into a half sphere with sandpaper, and paint it the same shade as the head. Then paint the clothes section by section. Start with lighter shades and work toward darker ones—that way you won’t need to wash your brush at every color change. Use a smaller brush at the edges and thin the paint slightly with water to get the edges as neat as possible. Paint the mill’s lower part in a brown “shoe” color, and draw and fill in the shoe details with a gold paint marker.
4. Give your figure a face: With a small brush and white acrylic paint, paint a rectangular mouth and half-circle eyes. Paint the lower part of the mouth on the mill’s top, just below the head. When the paint is dry, use a fine black paint marker to outline the eyes and add eyebrows and a mustache. Outline the mouth with a dark red marker (or paint it with a fine brush). Draw the teeth lines with a fine paint marker. Hot-glue the wooden half bead above the mustache as the nose. Glue a little merino wool in place for the beard and hair.
5. Cut a strip of gold cardstock about 5 cm (around 2″) wide for the crown. For an even zigzag edge, mark points on the back of the strip at 1.5-centimeter intervals (5/8″) and cut identical notches between each pair of points. Hot-glue the ends of the strip together. Finish the crown with a sparkly ribbon if you like. Hot-glue the crown onto the figure’s head.
6. Finish the outfit by reinforcing the clothing edges with a gold paint marker and adding more details. Decorate the clothes by gluing a fabric ribbon or velvet ribbon for the belt and a few sequins for the buttons.
