After selling our Christmas tree at a yard sale when we moved house
earlier this year, I just assumed we’d buy another one when Christmas
rolled around – preferably a real one. I have a lovely vision in my head
of us all wandering around a Christmas tree farm and picking our own…
But with an adventurous baby who likes to eat everything and pull
herself up on everything, any kind of tree wasn’t very appealing. Then I
spotted Leslie’s beautiful painted driftwood tree in her Colour Me Pretty column for Decor8 and it was decided: we’d do a painted stick tree this year on the wall.
So on a trip to the park, we all hunted down some sticks and I did a
quick layout on the ground to ensure we had the right sizes. Then we all
carried them back to our apartment – people no doubt wondering what on
earth a family of 5 were doing carrying assorted sticks down the street.
Zak looked a little like Gandalf with his staff-like stick. Anyway, I
put out some paints and the kids and I got painting. Then I popped them
up on the wall (the velcro 3M sticks worked best here) and draped some
mini Ikea lights over them. Steve stuck the star ornament on the top
(the Christmas-tree topper is always his job) and we were done!
We love it – it’s not as pretty as Leslie’s, but hey, I had “assistants” in Zak and Layla! Steve has set us the challenge to come up with a new kind of Christmas tree every year. Should be interesting!!!
PS: I posted a tutorial about the gold-leaf tags here.
PPS: Viv from Ish & Chi is doing a sweet series called 12 Days Before Christmas, speaking to various bloggers about various Christmassy things, like me who rambled too much, as usual, about crafty things. You can read it here.
{Images by Belinda Graham for The Happy Home}
cheers bx