"A" is for Advent

Christmas is coming need I remind you and one can never have too many Christmas decorations, especially when you spy something you don't already have.  Meet my Christmas Lollipop Advent Tree:

Of course I didn't come up with this idea all on my own, I have to give credit to the inspiration for my knock off:

picture from Garnet Hill

I saw this too cute advent tree in the Garnet Hill catalog for a mere $68 buckaroos and thought with my new basic woodworking skills I could definitely recreate it.  Here goes nothing.

I took all 1x2 scraps, a 5/16 dowel and a 1x4 scrap cut to 3.5" for the base.  Below are the cut pieces and I made a center hole in each piece (using a 3/8" drill bit so it could slide on the 5/16 dowel and swivel) and 2 holes on each end - only about 1/2" into the wood - for the lollipop sticks.

Then I found colored stain from Minwax - never knew but they have it and it works awesome! 

Now for some light sanding.

Next I glued the dowel into the base (I did predrill a 5/16" hole but not all the way through the base).  Then I made spacers from this 7/16" plastic tubing.  You can barely see them in photo way above and even less so in real life but the spacers keep the wood pieces from touching so they can swivel nicely.  Each spacer is about 1/2" long except the one piece I put on top to hold everything on which was only about 1/4" long.

So it goes piece of tubing, wood, piece of tubing, wood, and on and on until you have 12 gradating pieces of wood.

I just arranged the wood pieces like a spiral so each lollipop has its own space without knocking into something above.  (This also helps with the balance so the tree doesn't tip over.)  Here she is with Dum Dums - and I can only imagine how great it would be with Blow Pops.

Not bad for scrap wood, $6 of stain (which I only used a tiny bit) and about 3" of plastic tubing.  Merry Christmas kiddos and happy licking all those lollies!