As soon as I spotted the mushroom ornament, I knew I had my project. The instruction for the mushroom ornament simply states that you are to, "Cut plastic pen case (wha?) in half and glue onto clip clothespin. Cut a foam ball in half for tops." Dude, I can do better than that! I kept the clothespin and the foam ball, but everything else I needed to change and fancy up a bit. I decided that I needed to revisit my old fave- the sequin ornament.

I used the remaining half of the foam ball to make the stem by cutting a basic stem shape and rounding off the cut edges by again smooshing them down.

My precious minon is not allowed to use knives, needles or hot glue guns just yet, but boy can she paint. I let her paint the tops red. It was the only way to get her to stop whining, really. The red paint is necessary before the next step because it functions as a primer for the red sequins (unless you want white peeking through). I painted the stems white too. They don't get sequins, but I didn't want them to be just plain styrofoam either.

I thought about painting the clothespins green, but after I realized how difficult it was to get green paint in all the nooks and crannies, I moved on to a better solution- moss. I hotglued moss onto the top of the clothespin and trimmed off the excess dangly bits, hotglued the stem into the mushroom cap, and then hotglued the mushroom onto the clothespin. After I made the initial prototype, I ended up doing an assembly line process and made several at one go.

The result- I love them. When Christmas is over, I'm planning on wrapping these up with the utmost care to try to preserve them. The moss might need to be replaced now and then, but I hope one day Eleanor will be putting these on her own tree. D'aww!