Popping Pine Cones For English Cottage Gourd Birdhouses

It's time to get busy again pulling pine cone petals for " Our Pine Cone Roofed English Cottages ". It takes a lot of time and patience to do pine cone roofs .

It takes cutting them all to different sizes, your fingers and hands get ALL sticky from the sap on some of the pine cones and the pine cone petals . It will wash off after you wash them a few times but take note to plan on sticky fingers and  the glue sure doesn't help  with the fingers sticking together.

These have pointed tips 

You have to pull the petals all the way off the stem so you get the whole petal, Don't worry in the process you will break a lot of them  ( which means they would not have worked in the first place they were to thin ) Luckily we have trees with pine cones that for me work out pretty good. I would LOVE to get my hands on some of those big hearty pine cones. 

 A Closed Pine cone of course these won't work

After we pull all the petals off the pine cone we just fill up gallon size baggies, zip them shut for further use. It takes an amazing amount of pine cone petals to fill a gallon size bag, Also it takes many many to do one roof on our " Old English  Cottage  Pine Cone Roofed  " Gourd Birdhouses .

I always start off by painting the top of the gourd black where I think I want to start the roof. The reason for doing this is so of course none of the white will show through , You could actually paint it any color you may want too, I just prefer to use black or brown ,

This is what they look like when the roofs are done , of course I'm still doing the roof on the one on the far right. The two in the middle are base coated with the colors I am using for the birdhouses, one is a Slate Grey and the other is Itilain Sage.

Yes these are the finished birdhouses. you can see the Pine Cone Roofed Old English Greyatone Cottage Gourd Birdhouse here at Our Etsy Shop :  https://www.etsy.com/listing/493177808/unique-pinecone-roofed-old-english?ref=shop_home_feat_4 As you are reading this I am getting  to list the Itilian Sage Cottage Gourd Birdhouse .

 Of course We are NOT done with only these two ,,,,we have many more to come and a New way of making our Pine Cone roofs will be popping up in our Etsy Shop soon, So keep on checking back ,
We  would LOVE for you to give us some ideas on :

What colors shoud we paint some of the next birdhouses ?

Any other suggestions you might like to contribute ? We would Love some feed back ...

Thank You for stopping by . We sure hope you enjoyed reading what we LOVE to do  !

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