Crafty Rach: The Flame Tree: A Beautiful Jewellery Stand

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a few pictures of the Flame Tree that was in my grandparent's garden. I used its colour scheme to help me design and finish my latest creation. I absolutely love this colour spectrum - a warm colour palette as some might say - from a deep magenta colour, all the way through to a lovely sunny yellow. (I know the leaves were also green in places, but for the purposes of what I wanted to do, I didn't venture into adding similar colours.)

I picked up this project from Spotlight. Kaisercraft produces unfinished MDF projects - one of which is a family tree.

I had seen a suggestion that one could easily take away the backing part of the tree, just leaving the intricate detail of the branches and leaves, allowing it to be used as a jewellery stand instead.

To make sure the finished product looked good, I primed the surface and sanded it back.

Instead of mixing the individual colours on a separate surface, I decided to add the colours to the MDF surface as I went. This was a bit risky as there was a possibility that I would just make a mess and not show a progression between the different colours, but I had faith in my ability to get it right.

In hindsight, I could have taken photos of this process, but I guess I was too caught up in it, and by the time I realised I was finished - it was too late.

I started off with Magenta at the "trunk" of the tree, moving through to a Brilliant Azure colour (Red), then progressively mixed in a Sunny Yellow to produce an orange colour. I then cleaned off my brush to ensure the Sunny Yellow colour was applied cleanly to the tips of the flame tree (without trace of any other colour paint).

The one pain point with this project was having to paint the sides of the trunk, branches and leaves - they were so intricate!! It took me at least four hours to paint.

And of course I then finished it with Jo Sonja's Opal Dust and a Gloss Varnish.