The kitchen was the only room in the house that hadn’t been hit with the Christmas wand and I wanted to fix that.

I decided that the blank wall space above the kitchen table would be the perfect spot for this craft idea.

I got a helping hand from my Dad again and asked him to pick up some nice sticks from the hedges on his travels and he didn’t disappoint.

I lined them up starting with the longest and heaviest at the bottom up to the smallest.

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I then divided the remainder of the baubles I had depending on the length of the stick. I threaded them onto the sticks.

Once the baubles where all on I took some craft twine to join the sticks together. When I did it first I had about 30cm between each stick but that was too big a gap so I reduced that to 20cm. I tied a separate piece of string between each stick making it easier to fix one side at a time.

The Tree was ready to hang. To be honest it looked a little bare so I decided to add a few more things to make it look better.

Firstly I added one of the flower bunches from the church pews at our wedding. I put it at the top to look like a star.

Then I added some small rope light to brighten it up. Looking much better now.

And there you have it. even if you don’t have floor space there is always room for a Christmas Tree somewhere

I’m not sure if I have said it before but I am a farmers daughter. I have been exposed to a lot of materials that other people might not ever get their hands on. This upcycle project is one of these.

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My dad has been getting our grass cut into round bales the last few years. The rap for the bales comes on these heavy rolls. Dad had a good few of these lying about so I came up with an idea.

I had seen these lovely Christmas trees made from pipe on Pinterest so I took that idea and twisted it a bit. Firstly I got my dad to cut the rolls into 4 even sections. Dad has a big shead full of all sorts if mad tools and work benches so he was happy to help.

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I needed 28 pieces to make the pyramid I had in mind. Originally I had planed to spray paint these green but with the weather being so wet and cold getting out to a well ventilated area wasn’t really an option. So I went old school and got some good old poster paint from the craft store.

This as you can see was easy to apply but the coverage wasn’t great so I had to do 2 coats of paint. I wasn’t that strict on the inside of the rolls just made sure the roll was covered in green.

I had decided that this Tree was going to be displayed in a window to the front of the house. When I placed the rolls on the sill I could only see half the first run of circles so I needed a shelf to put them on.

Dad to the rescue again. He supplied me with this pallet end that would work perfectly. I simply covered it in wallpaper. Backwards with the white side out and then put some snow blanket over it so it looked like the ground.

Now I could start stacking the rolls into the pyramid. But this came with a new problem. I didn’t take into consideration how heavy these rolls where and as I stacked them the pyramid would collapse. the first solution to the problem I came up with was to glue the bottom 3 on each end so they would work as anchors. This actually worked pretty well but as the pyramid got higher even the anchors started to slip.

My Dad advised that maybe if I glued another 3 in the middle of the bottom row, that might do the trick, but the same thing happened.

Next I decided that putting ledges on each side of the bottom roll would stop them from creeping out. I took some Lolly pop sticks. Snapped them in half and glued 4 halves together. I then glued this to the base under the blanket of snow so it couldn’t be seen. I tried stacking the rolls again and BINGO it worked.

Now I could start arranging it in the window. Once I had the base and rolls up I picked a selection of decorations to fill in the rolls.

I was so happy with how it turned out and it looked great in the sun in out front window. What do you think?

This is a project I have had my eye on for a while and I had collected quite a few toilet roll over the weeks to make sure I had enough

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I took the centre of the toilet roll and flattened it. Then taking some sharp scissors I cut the roll in 1cm strips. As I went along I could see that I had too different sizes so I separated them into too piles.

Using 5 of the larger roll cut strips I arranged them like petals and glued then with a flue gun to make a flower.

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Using the smaller roll I too it and folded it in half making 2 small petals. I then placed a glob of hot glue in the centre of one of the petals and put the small petals in the centre.

I repeated this on on 5 large petals. I also used this technique on other designs.

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Here are the designs, 2 small and 2 large.

To finish these off I got some budges silver spray paint to make them sparkle. Now I am all up for budget crafts but I wont be buying it again. No only did feck all silver colour come out of the can, it didn’t stay on the snow flake. As I started hanging them on the window my fingers where covered in silver. Listen learned, always buy good spray pain.

Paper Christmas Tree

As I was wandering around one of my favorite shops https://sostrenegrene.com/ when I came across these Styrofoam cones and ball and started to wonder what I could do with them. I took the Medium and Large cones home with me.

Believe it or not I still have some materials left from our wedding (I’ve been using up scraps here and there). I have some strips of paper I used for the paper flowers. So I decided to use up some of those

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Taking one of the strips I used the dull side of the scissors to curl the paper. I then cut the strip in half till I had nice little pile gathered.

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I covered the cone with some white crepe paper using PVA glue. Once it was dry I started adding the curly strips around the base. Using a brush I put PVA blue on the cone and then held the paper curl in place.

I repeated this with the curls all the way up to the top of the cone. I decided to just leave the top as is with no extra embellishment.

Wool Christmas Tree

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For this tree I covered the cone with green crepe paper. this way if there where any gaps in the wool it would be green that could be seen.

I took the wool I wanted to use and started to make spirals on my finger.

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Making the spirals different sizes I started gluing them to the base. I used hot glue, this can be tricky if you put too much on it can melt the Styrofoam so be careful.

Velvet Ribbon Christmas Tree

This was the trickiest one to make I have to say. You know when the idea in your head doesn’t match how it turns out. That’s what happened with this tree.

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Again the cone was covered in green crepe before I started decorating. I then took some dark green velvet ribbon and made little tips, hot gluing them to keep in place. after I had a little pile done, I started gluing them around the base.

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I tried to put the second row in between the gaps left by the first row to make it look fuller. I had to start using a small width ribbon to fill in some gaps.

Another problem that arose with this craft was the fact that the velvet was like Velcro, it picked up every bit of dirt going. especially the glue gun residue.

Eventually I got it finished and once I took a lint roller to it, it actually turned out ok.

Here are the finished products, let me know if you have a try?