Today’s Guest Post comes from Jill from Properfud. Jill’s writing is so witty and her recipes totally delicious. I try not be jealous when she details her children eating all sorts of everything, including spinach (My children have obviously missed a gene somewhere on the vegetable-loving front..). Jill also has some very cool tutorials on her blog (I am going to do these knee patches soon. Very soon) and has kindly produced another wonderful one for our Craft Advent! These have me so excited!
I love love love this garland. So much so that I think I’ll hold off on putting my actual Christmas tree up for another week. I wouldn’t want to overshadow its loveliness frankly. You can of course use more seasonal colours instead of my practically grinch-like sea green, blues and purples. A glittery gold card would be lovely I’d say.
What you need:
– A bit of cardboard for your tree template.
– A book for your plainer sides. Dystopian source material optional.
– Some “fancy” paper for the coloured side. As it happens, this wrapping paper from Tiger is double-sided, so I decided to use both complementary sides but you could keep it just one plain colour.
– A glue stick, scissors, needle and thread for assembly
Draw one side of a Christmas tree on some card. Fold it over and cut out it out so you’re left with a symmetrical tree.
Ten trees for your garland will require forty trees to be cut out. So you don’t want to be doing one at a time. I managed about five in each go by using an elastic band around my template and pages, and by folding my coloured paper a bunch of times.
This will slow you down no end, I wouldn’t recommend a feline helper at all at all.
Crease each of your trees down the centre.
Glue each half of a folded tree to half of another folded tree, alternating coloured paper with the book pages. When I did this, I found that the edges didn’t exactly match. So much for symmetry. For the first three or four trees I painstakingly trimmed the edges until I realised that you didn’t really notice that unless you’re looking at them up close. So my top tip is: Don’t bother with that.
Leave the trees dry overnight. Even just using a glue stick they stiffen up nicely. Holding your tree flat, pierce a hole through the crease and string up your trees. I used a strong needle and darning thread. Ta-da!
(Thank you Jill! I note that they colour-match the guitar hanging on the wall!! I think these would look fantastic within a Christmas themed scene… like the one I’m going to make with my reindeers that Sadhbh detailed how to make on Friday)
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I really like this…..mind you the ‘feline helper’ is freaking me out. We could do this one I think, well, lucky for us that the dystopian source material is optional, ha ha, brilliant!
Yes, as someone who keeps cats at a reasonable length away from her, I felt the same Joanna 😀