Paper Mâché Reindeer

I found a paper mâché reindeer at the craft store really cheap and even tho I had no idea what I'd do with it, I knew it'd be something. Too cute to pass up. I've been seeing deer antler art a lot lately, and that led to my thinking the paper mâché deer with fake flowers would be cute hanging on our front door.

Because it's paper and not sealed and our door gets a lot of sun, wind, occasional rain, I painted the face with a light creamy-colored craft paint just to help seal it. Then I wrapped the antlers using thick twine, just adding a drop of hot glue here and there to hold in place.

I tried a couple different types of twine before
deciding to go with the one on the right

For the flowers I found a bouquet of white flowers that looked wintery to me, what I really like is that the bouquet is already tied together so I didn't have to come up with how to attach individual flowers to the head. I just trimmed the stems down so they are flush with the back of the deer head, and held them in place on the deer with more twine tied around the hanger that came on the back of the deer. I'm not permanently attaching the bouquet so I can change it out with the seasons as I see fit (I already bought a pink bouquet on sale the other day at the craft store - look at me planning ahead for Valentine's day!).

For Christmas I hung it on top of a tinsel wreath with a big silver bow and put a couple pieces of fake pine garland around the antlers - wouldn't ya know it, we had a wind storm and the whole thing fell down and one of the antlers broke. Sigh. I performed surgery (removed the twine, hot glued back together, reinforced with masking tape, then re-wrapped the twine) and it's good as new. Better. Stronger. 6 million dollar man-like reindeer....or was that the Bionic Woman? Whatev. I fixed it.

Note that has nothing to do with how to make this project: Dave naturally rolled his eyes when I showed him our new front door-flower-decorated reindeer and asked why "the buck" was wearing a flower crown. I pointed out that it is, in fact, a female reindeer and did he know that female reindeers grow antlers? Hope you're sitting down and ready for this - because if you know Dave you know this is a shocker - he doubted me. Mumbled something about only males having antlers. And then I got to PROVE HIM WRONG by googling the fact that female reindeers do indeed grow antlers! Oh man that felt good.

One more reindeer fact because I'm on a roll - male reindeer shed their antlers in the fall and females in the spring. Which means Santa's reindeer are probably girls because the males don't have antlers in the winter!!! Mind blown, right? 😁

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