Dried Fruit Christmas Tree Decorations

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Hubs has been wanting us to make dried orange Christmas tree decorations for a while now, so we made some at the weekend! We not only dried out orange slices, but apples too. I love how when you cut through an apple you get a star shape in the center of the slice!

They’re very easy to make…although it was a bit trial and error for us! First off, thinly slice an orange and an apple (or more if you want). Make sure that your knife is good and sharp so that it goes cleanly through the fruit. Then pat the fruit dry with some paper towels.

So that you can hang the dried fruit decorations when they are dried out, make a hole at the top with a straw and place on a rack to dry out.

I said we had some trial and error with the drying process. We started by putting them in the oven on the very lowest temperature. After an hour we checked them, and all looked good. We left them for another hour, still fine…but then, we forgot about them! Oops! The apples were okay, but the oranges had turned a horrible brown colour so we binned them!

I’d read online that you can dry the orange slices on top of the radiator, so that’s exactly what we did! After a few hours I turned them over, and left them to dry out for about a day. We had the heating on and off during the day, but they still dried out with the warmth of the air in the house.

With the fruit all dried, it was time to assemble them so that we could hang them from our evergreen tree. I decided to use some raffia, but you could use string or ribbon.

I’ll try to explain how I attached the raffia so that the decorations could be hung…I took a length of the raffia and folded it in half. I then pushed this loop through the pre-prepared hole at the top of the fruit slice and threaded the other end of the raffia through the loop. I gently pulled it tight and then, after deciding how long I wanted the hanging loop to be, tied off the end with a knot and cut off any excess.

I just love how the orange slices look when you hold them up to the light! You could hang these in front of a window – they would love so pretty and festive at this time of year ^_^

With all the dried fruit Christmas tree decorations created, it was time to hang them from the tree…

We both think they look fab, and it’s nice to have some more natural decorations in the house which is currently filled with colourful and glittery decorations!

It’s become quite the tradition for us to have a small evergreen tree as well as an artificial tree…last year we made gingerbread Christmas tree decorations. We also collected lots of pine cones from our walk in the park at the weekend, so going to find ways to use them for Christmas too.

Have you ever made natural or edible decorations for your Christmas tree?

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This post is part of Cook, Craft, Create: December 2013, why not check out the other ideas this season?

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