o Christmas tree

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This is only our second year with a real tree, so I am still learning all the little nuances and tricks to having a cut piece of forest in your living room. FYI you just cannot squeeze a nine foot tree in a stand that advertises a seven foot limit. Not unless someone is willing to stand and hold the tree upright until December 25th.

I don’t know what happened last year, but I suspect we just got lucky. The tree was nine feet but it was perfectly straight and somehow it tolerated the tiny tree stand. This year we picked a tree with a leaning trunk. And a wide girth. And we didn’t bother to measure it at the tree farm so of course it was over nine feet.

We were forced to do some serious pruning at 9:00 that night after we got home. In fact, we took an entire foot and a half off the bottom. It was Caleb. In the living room. With a reciprocating saw.

Anyway.

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I asked him to save the piece of trunk he cut off and I used it as the base for the felt Christmas trees on the dining table.

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Here’s a really easy tree to make in an afternoon. Or if your fingers are itching to cut a ton of felt leaves. I highly suggest you double up your fabric and cut two at once. I didn’t figure this out until I’d completed my first tree.

You could make these with green felt and they’d be more tree-like. I used the gray I had left over from Jon’s wings:

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In my mind these were supposed to be like an Indian feather cape, but another photographer said he was “a cute little turkey!”

ha. I can see it now.

Well the “turkey wings” were pretty popular and now Jackson is asking for a pair.

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Back to the tree.

I happened to have three of these tree forms laying around. I bought them at Hobby Lobby when they were half off. You never know when you might need a tree form or two.

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When I had enough felt leaves cut out I started gluing them on, starting at the bottom and working my way around and up the form. Hot glue is my friend and my enemy. Just looking at this picture makes my fingertips burn.

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Caleb drilled a hole in the tree trunk that was the same size as this dowel rod we had in the garage and I used wood glue to cement them together. I covered the bottom with felt to keep any leaked sap off my table runner. It came off a pine tree after all.

What was once the lower foot and half of our Christmas tree..

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