This project has been a fun (sleigh) ride.  From the warm cozy colors to the Vintage art paper, but there’s nothing that stamps this piece as being uniquely hand made by yours truly – yet.

I had early on decided that I wanted a fire burning in that extra large hearth and while I worked on the main project my mind was creating and crafting my fire.  This is what I came up with:

One of my favorite things is to be able to incorporate Nature into my art.  There’s a creek that runs near to where I live and it’s lined with Cottonwoods, so me and the dog went for a hike and I picked up a few fallen branches – instant logs.

Starting with a regular (flickering) tea light…

cut two lengths of wood and snug them in close to the tea light – don’t glue anything yet.  Start with the larger/thicker pieces of wood at the bottom and as you go up in layers use consecutively thinner pieces.

Two more pieces of wood, lay these cross ways atop the first two.  See the little blobs of hot glue?  This will be how you hold this structure together.

I’m going to fill in that gap by gluing in a short piece.

And doing the same on the other side.

See how much thinner this top piece is?  It’s also situated more to the inside towards the flame.  I’m narrowing the pile now so it’s starting to have a pyramid shape.

Again, filling in the gaps as you go.  This one is for the top gap, I’ll get to the bottom one later.

Three layers done and it starting to look like what I had imagined.

For the fourth layer I didn’t go up as much as I went in.  Four short pieces glued in, are tucked in tight, and just barely rise above layer #3 but they fill in that top opening.

None of the logs are glued to the tea light.  The log pile just sits down over the light, this way when the battery dies on this light you can replace it with a new light.

You may have noticed some gaps in your wood pile as you went along but in the end these just add to the authenticity of the fire.  When the light is on you can see ‘flame’ flickering out through those gaps.  But we’re not done yet.

Using Stickles Orange Peel and Xmas Red, I started dotting and dashing this glitter glue on the logs.  I paid especial attention to areas where I could see the hot glue on the logs and I also added it to areas that I thought were logical ‘burning’ points in my fire.

Unfortunately, glitter is difficult to capture in pics, but you can get a fair idea here, anyways.

But I didn’t like the fire just sitting on the bare red painted surface inside the hearth – that looked really wrong to me.  These mica fragments will fix that.

I smeared around some white glue and dumped a pile of the mica chips on it and let it all dry.  Then I just tipped out the overage and voila, ashes for my fire to sit on.

This is just what I had in mind – I love how it looks!

Isn’t that a pretty glow?  Look how the fire flickers out through the gaps.

Thanks for joining me on my Custom Advent adventure,  and to all a goodnight…

Craft On