25 Days of Handmade Christmas: Day 19

I completely messed this up this morning! I thought I had this post all ready to go and I checked this morning to make sure all had posted and realized that my little tid bit had not been saved. This is NOT my tutorial. It is actually from Bonnie who blogs over at A Wee Meenit. Anyway, I love burlap, and her take on the burlap tree is adorable! Be sure to stop by her blog! Now on to Bonnie...


I have had a few people wanting to know how I made the burlap tree for my Christmas table scape, so here are the DIY instructions. But I warn you, it is super easy, but more time consuming than you would think! 

Here are some trees I found made with Burlap, if you wish to view them, just click on the tree and it will take you to the owners sight.

But I had an idea of how to make them a little different than that.

Here is the tree pictured in my Christmas dinning table scape.

I love the texture of it and how it looks up against the greens.

Here is a birds eye view. Why? Sometimes I ask myself that same question!

I also finished the bottom off with burlap, just so the Styrofoam would not flake off on to the table over time.

So I started with a Styrofoam tree, any size and some burlap. I am not sure how much I used, I had some from another project and then ran out and had to go get some more. 

 cut our squares, about 2x2" on the bottom, and got smaller as I went up.

First fold the square in half.

Then half again.

But try to pinch the square so that the hot glue can sit on the bottom of the pinched square.

I even took the glue gun and before I placed glue on it, I used the tip of the gun to flatten out a spot for the glue to sit.

This helps with 2 things. One, so you don't have glue running down the 'cone' shape you have made with the square. (HOT HOT HOT) and two so you have a larger flat surface to stick to the tree.

Hold it there for a few seconds until cool, or I just held it there with a few fingers and went on to my next square while that one cooled. I got pretty good at multitasking cause I'm ADHD it really needed a LOT of squares to fill the tree. I wanted it nice and fluffy so I put them very close together.

I did alter the cone a little and wanted a pointier top on it, so I just pinched the top 

to make it a little slimmer. You get the idea. You will hear some sizzling when you add the 

burlap square with glue on it to the tree. The hot glue will melt some of the burlap. 

Did I say it was HOT?!! But it did not affect the tree in any way.

You will have to  manicure your tree when done and pull off the loose strands of burlap. You could do this for an hour, but don't get carried away, just get most of the loose ones, if you keep pulling every strand, the entire tree will pull apart!

I thought of putting a topper on the tree or a few ornaments, but I like it simple like this. 

The other way I wanted to make it is to do an Ombre burlap tree with the shades of burlap getting lighter as it went up the tree! IF I have time...