I’ve been seeing lots of bottle brush trees all over Pinterest this Christmas season and love all of the different colors.  I love the vintage-looking scenes that can be set up with bottle brush trees and I’ve always preferred to decorate with pastels and bright colors instead of the usual red and green themes.  I had some bottle brush trees left over from the snow globes I made last year and also bough a bag of small bleached trees from Michaels.

I bleached the trees I had that were green with the intention of dyeing them after I was done but was pleasantly surprised when the trees I had from last year turned light pink before bleaching completely and the one green tree I had bought this year turned a light mint bluish-green.  Since this was the colors I wanted to dye them I left them this color and then fully bleached a few.

I used my hurricane glass vase to bleach because I wanted something that was tall and narrow to stick the trees is, normally I wouldn’t use my good glass but ya know, use what you have!  I used 1/3 bleach to 2/3 water in the glass and used tongs to dip them in.  It really didn’t take long for them to start bleaching and I swished them around in the bleach water to help with the tongs, just wear rubber gloves and be careful.  After I bleached the trees I soaked them in soapy water to get the bleach off.

Most of the tutorials I read said to use Rit dye to dye, or food coloring or cool-aid would also probably work, but I used this spray on dye by SEI Tumble Dye that I already had.  I love this because it is already made and you can just spray it on, it’s perfect for small dye jobs and comes it tons of colors.  You can find it at craft stores or online at www.shopsei.com. 

I also touched up the happy accident trees a bit with the spray dye and mixed a bit with water in a spray bottle to get different shades.  On the biggest tree I sprayed a couple different colors for an airbrushed ombre effect.  That was another reason I used the spray, for the ombre effect, but if you’re going for one solid color, I’d recommend the dip dye method.

I love how they turned out, and I also sprayed a bottle brush wreath I found at Joanne Fabric! Show me yours on Instagram with the hashtag #peppermintsandhoneybees.

Happy Holidays!