Hanging Branch Tutorial

Well, this weekend we finally added the branch to the nursery so it is now completely done. Now we just need our little munchkin to hurry up and get here. Just three and a half more weeks until she's due, but I am certainly hoping she comes a little bit earlier.  When we did the branch in Lillie's room a month or so ago we got a lot of questions about how we did it, so I am going to do my best to show you. This is one of my favorite projects because I love the natural element it provides and it was FREE! Well, the one in the nursery was free, the one in Lillie's room I did have to buy the cardstock for the birds but otherwise it was free. Also, I know you all are probably getting sick of seeing photos of our house as that has been all the last several posts have been about. My next two posts will be some fun project ones -  I promise!

First, here is what it looks like in the nursery now:

   

And here is the original one we did in Lillian Annabel's room:

  

 

So here's how we did it:

1) First we went out in the woods and collected a few different branches to try. Once we held them up in the nursery and found the one we liked best we started spray-painting it.  Lillie seemed to think the more paint she could get on her feet the better!

2) Completely coat your branch to get it how you want. (For the one in Lillie's room I wanted it to look like birch tree branch so I just did a light coating on it and let a lot of the natural branch color show through. For the one in the nursery I wanted it to be completely ivory colored so we thoroughly covered it in paint.)

We got a lot of e-mails wondering what color and brand spray paint we used for our egg topiaries and wreaths so I thought for this project I would make sure to include this information (this is a different color than we used for the topiaries). Anyway, it is from Lowe's and is by Valspar. The color is Churchill Hotel Vanilla and the finish is Satin. I used this spray paint for another project a while back and did NOT like how it looked, however I was really happy with how it looked on the branch.

3) Once the branch was dry it was time to hang it from the ceiling. For Lillie's room I had used two hooks similar to this one but smaller. (I didn't feel like hauling the ladder upstairs and climbing it just to get a good picture so I thought I would take a photo of the closest thing I had to it. Please note, though, the hooks I used in Lillie's room were much smaller!)

I didn't have any of the small hooks left when I hung the one in the nursery so I just used two of these:

 4) Once I had the two hooks/screws safely in the ceiling I tied on some clear plastic wire. For the ones in the nursery I tied it around the base of the screw and then tightened the screw all the way into the ceiling so hold the clear wire tight. For the hooks, I just tied the clear wire in triple knots onto the hook.

5) Next I held the branch to about where I wanted it and tied each of the wires to the branch so that the branch was now hanging suspended from the ceiling.  (In the photo below I heighted the contrast so you could really see the clear wire hanging and where it is tied onto the branch. You an also see the brown string hanging from the branch as well, which I will get to next).

 

6) Once your branch is securely hanging from the ceiling it is time to hang the birds. For Lillie's room I used nine birds cut out from cardstock. For the nursery I used seven  birds cut out in fabric and I used a heat transfer to iron them together so they would be thicker and wouldn't just flop all over seeing how the fabric was so lightweight.  Then I punched a small hole in the top wing and just used regular sewing thread to hang each bird from the branch. For the nursery I used a light brown thread to help blend in with the wall color and in Lillie's room I used a light gray thread. It really helps using a thread color close to your wall color so that when you look at the branch and birds you don't even notice any of the string you just notice the branch and birds.

 

And there you have it! And as you can see in these two photos, which I did not do any photoshopping to,  you can barely see the thread at all (you can see the clear wire a little bit, but that is just because it is pretty thick to make sure it holds the branch up).

 

The weather here has been beautiful the past few days and we have been spending most of our days and evenings down in Colonial Williamsburg.  Here is Lillie getting ready to head out for a picnic on Monday. She informed me she needed her sunglasses and backpack and off she went to find them. She thought she was pretty cool!

And here she is with her horse friends: