Colour Changing Pinecones

How do you change the colour of pinecones? Soak them in a bleach solution of course!

making a pinecone wreath at craftygardener.ca — pinecone wreath

The Fall decorations have been slowly coming out now it is September and the weather is changing. I found this older post on bleaching pinecones and updated it to my new WordPress format, updated some photos and links to other posts.

From the pinecone collection I chose a variety of sizes, and they went from this

changing the colour of pinecones at craftygardener.ca — pinecones

…. to this, in a few easy steps.

I had seen the almost white pinecones in various stores and displays and did some research on how to do it myself. I found it was an easy process with water, bleach and a bucket.

I went with 2 parts water and 1 part bleach in a container. Add the pinecones and you will see they float to the top. I used a couple of pieces of styrofoam to push down and keep them under the water. They need to stay in the solution at least 24 hours, perhaps longer if you have more cones filling the bucket. You can easily check if they look like they are done. Choose pinecones that are open, but after being in the solution they will close up. Using open ones to start with gives the solution a chance to get in between all the bits of the cones.

Be careful when removing the pinecones as you don’t want the bleach solution to splash on you. We have been so lucky with our weather and I was able to do this part outside. I tipped it out onto the wanna be grass and then arranged them in the bottom of another container to dry off. As they dried off the colour change was more obvious.

It was nice outside, but not hot enough to dry the cones out completely and have them open up again. So while the oven was hot (not turned on) after cooking a meal I popped them in to dry out some more. They didn’t smell as some of you might think.

To finish the drying process off I laid them out on top of the dryer where it was warm. If the heat is on you could put them over a floor vent and let the heat do the rest. You can see how they had started to open out in the oven.

bleaching pinecones at craftygardener.ca

I love how they turned out. Now they were ready for the Fall table display. This is my thrift display.

The wire basket was $1, the solid wooden balls were 50₵ each, and the little grapevine balls were in a brown lunch bag you could fill for $1. I also got some shiny Christmas ornaments and a couple more pinecones to fill the bag. The acorns were collected by our daughter while she was walking her dog. There are rocks in bottom, special ones that the grandkids collected for me on our BC vacation last summer. The pinecones were taken from my collection that I’m always adding to.

It was a fun and interesting project to do. I suggest doing it when you can be outside, so the smells of the bleach solution are outside and you can use the heat of the sun to dry out the pinecones.

If you search how to bleach pinecones you will find all sorts of sites that have done this project with lots of success. Next time I just might toss in a few acorns and see how they turn out.

Have you tried bleaching pinecones and/or acorns?

I also got out the rake wreath, and some of the Fall wreaths.

This is one of my favourite Fall wreaths from several years ago and it is still looking good. It’s made from a grape wine wreath, orange ribbon and coloured plastic canvas cut into leaf shapes and stitched around the edges.