Pretty Paper Tree

So you've seen the ribbon trees around right?? The cute ones made from foam cones and covered in ribbons. Like this one from She's Kinda Crafty

Super cute right?? But what if it's Saturday night and it's cold and your kids want to do a Christmas project and you don't want to go out? You don't have ribbon or a foam cone around either but you really want to make a tree like this?? Well, around here we improvise. I made a cone of out some bent up poster board I had stashed beside the dryer, cut up some strips of scrapbook paper & fired up the glue gun.  This is how it went down.

Those are just a few of the strips of paper. This took about six 12X12 sheets of paper cut into 1X4 inch strips.

This the cone. I just rolled up some poster board into a cone shape, trimmed a bit and secured with a few squirts of hot glue. Professional huh?? It's about eighteen inches tall or so. It would make a great dunce cap.

This is the first row of strips we glued on. We glued in a ring two inches from the bottom of the cone. And yes, that is my daughter with her finger up her nose. Classy! I had another photo of the cone at this stage but this one was too funny not to share!

Then we folded the strips up and secured with hot glue. I squirted the glue and Sweet Pea folded up the paper. Be careful when folding not to squish the folds. Squishing them will result in a flat tree.

We glued the second row in a ring about two inches up from the first. I tried to vary the pattern a bit. We then continued up to the top of the tree. For the top I made a ring out of a strip of paper, turned it on it's side and secured it around the top of the tree with glue. I'm totally sure I love that you can see the white side of the paper in all those loops. Might be cool to try this again with paper with a print on both sides or gluing to papers together before making the loops?

And here is the tree hanging out on top of the TV cabinet with my monkey's all dressed up for Christmas.