1 Stocking Stuffer Done! Homemade Wooden Tops!

We are trying to make Christmas at our house all hand made if possible this year, so we are starting off our holiday crafting with Christmas in July!  I'll write more about this later, but wanted to share my first completed project-four little wooden tops for W's stocking!  This is about as simple of a woodworking project as you can get.  I started with 1 12 inch, 1/4 inch diameter dowel rod, and some large 1 3/4 inch wooden wheels purchased from the craft store.

I sawed the dowel into 4 pieces and used a pencil sharpener to make points on one end of each piece.

I then sanded the dowel rods, smoothing out the points a bit and rounding the other end out some. I also then put the wheels onto the dowel rods just above the pointed ends.  You could glue these, but mine fit so tightly when I tried them, that I could not get the wheels back off to put the glue on.

Here are the tops put together and waiting to be painted.

I then painted them with water colors.  

I found that the yellow paint did not show up enough on it's own, so I layered yellow and blue paint to make one of the tops green.

I let the tops dry overnight and then polished them with several coats of my homemade beeswax polish.

I think they turned out lovely and look forward to putting them in W's stocking this Christmas.  At this point he can't spin the tops on his own but he loves to watch us spin them for him.