Pine Cone Craft: How to Collect and Clean and Prepare Pinecones for Crafts

If you visit your local craft store or craft department of a large discount department store, you will see net and cellophane bags of pine cones being sold for $5 and upward. These are not fancy pine cones; they are just naturally colored, or have a dash of glitter. It's hard to imagine buying pine cones when they are available free either in your yard, or somewhere close to your home. And you can collect all you desire, without paying a penny.

Decorating with pine cones is both fun and easy. We use them to create rustic centerpieces or elegant seasonal basket arrangements or wreaths and other Christmas decorations. They can be decorated to display on fireplace mantels or be transformed into bird feeders. Pine cones are great for children's crafts both in school and at home. Small pine cones make a great ingredient to scented potpourri too or can even be turned into fire starters. Pine corns can adorn candle bases or be turned into hanging holiday ornaments. You are only limited by your imagination in what you can create with a pine cone.

The trick however, to pine cone crafts, if you are collecting your own pine cones, is how to clean and prepare them properly so that they make durable crafts and are easy to work with.

Here's how to proceed to gathering and preparing your pine cones for craft use.

Plan an outing on a nice sunny day when you will collect pine cones. Pine cones fall most times of year, but particularly in the fall. There are soft shell pine cones and harder shell pine cones and various trees drop pine cones dependant on weather temperatures for that season. You may notice during a drought year that the trees that yield pine cones may be sparse, but the trees that were well watered with sprinkler systems will yield a lot. It is like night and day. Your neighbor, who doesn't water their lawn, might not have one single pine cone because the summer was dry and hot in a particular year. However, if you watered your lawn and have the same exact pine trees, you will see literally thousands of pine cones. The contrast is amazing to see the difference between a watered tree and one that received very little moisture.