Christmas Topiary Trees

Sometimes my craft projects are a little too ambitious. Case in point: the year I decided I would make a tabletop topiary tree every year for Christmas, so that eventually I would have a nice little collection of different themed mini Christmas trees. They would make fantastic center pieces or an occasional object of curiosity scattered throughout the house. They would also make great handmade gifts.

I haven't done one every year since I came up with this idea, but here are the ones I have done so far:

TREE 1:
The first one I did involved cutting all the petals off a pine cone and gluing them all over a tall Styrofoam cone. I had seen similar pine cone trees online and in several stores and thought that recreating them myself by hand would be simple and cost-effective. After doing one though, let me tell you: buying them is worth every penny.

It took super sharp scissors to cut off the petals from the pine cones. And it took a lot of pine cones to get enough petals. Gluing them on the shape one by one was extremely tedious. I had to start at the bottom with the largest petals and then worked my way up, making sure to over lap them evenly. I ran out of petals from my first group of cones and ended up having to use bigger sized petals from the next set of cones I cut up. And I had a few gaps where it was hard to get the petals to sit just right.

Originally I intended to just make trees of different materials: pine cones, paper, cloth, etc... but decorating the tree was too tempting. I had glitter covered floral picks that cut apart and spaced all over the tree. I also added berries and beads to simulate natural "ornaments". I topped the tree with a miniature pine cone and added a gold-painted base.

TREE 2:
After the tediousness of the pine cone tree, I wanted to cover my next shape quickly and easily. I found a sheet of moss in the floral section and thought it would do the job perfectly. It was cut to wrap around the shape and then glued on with hot glue. For the decorations I added some more of the gold leaves from the floral picks used in the last tree, thinking that I want all the trees to be tied together with at least one shared element in them. For the ornaments on this one, I used super tiny pine cones, and bits of flowers and pods from a bag of potpourri. Wanting to keep it natural looking, I added shell fragments from the jewelry section that looked like flowers, pinned to the tree with pearl straight pins. Red painted wood beads added a little bit of color, and a small sphere of potpourri pods glued together made the topper of the tree.

TREE 3:
Coming... eventually.

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