Today my mom and I enjoyed some mother daughter craft time and made some cute Christmas trees using items we already had on hand. There were a few bumps along the road when one of my ideas, which I thought was a wonderful, didn’t work out so well. Don’t worry I’ll share it with you. In the end our projects turned out cute and we got to spend time crafting and laughing together.

It all started when we were looking at cookie recipes on Pinterest and came across this paper tree idea I had pinned. We both thought, hey we can do that and without even reading the post/tutorial we headed off to the crafting room. Which is really just the dining room at my parents house, but more crafting gets done in there then dinning I think. Turns out the original pin tutorial may have been helpful (I have since read her post and she had some great ideas/instructions).

First we formed 3 different size cones out of some craft paper to use as the base of our trees, don’t ask me how I did it, I just twisted until they came out cones and quick hotguled.

Initially I wanted to make one of the trees out of waxed and parchment paper, thinking it would give my little paper tree a nice white snowy layered look, and the other two out of printed craft paper. So we gathered our supplied and started cutting the selected paper into strips using a craft scissors to give one edge a textured cut.

Turns out it is really hard to cut waxed paper with inexpensive craft scissors. This was only the first sign that my waxed and parchment tree idea may not be so bright after all. We found that if you cut the waxed paper into little squares first and then cut with the scalloped craft scissors you could get it to work but it took 2 passes and lots of time. But it did work, so we continued cutting. With the craft paper I could just cut long strips with the craft scissors first and since only one side needed to be textured I just cut my strips twice as wide as I would need them and then cut them down the middle with a regular scissors and then into little squares.

After I had a good stack of squares cut out I started hotgluing on the waxed paper and parchment paper onto my paper cone alternating waxed and parchment. Here is where the second problem with my snowy white Christmas tree occurred. You may already know what that problem is… but it took me a little longer to figure it out. I got to the second layer of paper when my parchment pieces started falling off. Turns out you can’t attached parchment paper with hot glue. Not wanting to give up on my tree yet I tried a tape runner, didn’t work, and then finally scotch tape, no go. This tree was nothing but trouble! Admitting defeat I pulled off all the waxed paper (it sticks really well with hotglue if you are wondering) the parchment paper had already fallen off and started over with craft paper.  Side note: I think this tree idea would work if I were using a styrofoam tree as a base and push pins to secure the pieces of waxed and parchment paper. Because I hate to fail, I may give it a try, along with purchasing a real pinking shears to make cutting the waxed paper easier.

Here is a picture of my waxed and parchment mess…

Moving on; I cut all my craft paper out and started applying it to my cone. First a ran my fingernail over the pieces of paper to make if curl up, you could also do this with a scissors, just like curling ribbon. Then I added a swipe of hotglue to the back and attached it to my cone. The first layer was 1/2 on the cone 1/2 off with each square slightly overlapping each other. The second layer overlaped the first and again each piece of paper overlapping each other.

I just continued like that, the closer I got to the top of my cone the thinner I made my strips of paper so they became less and less square as I went along turning into thin rectangles. I knew it was time to make them thinner when they didn’t want to curve arround the cone and stick out/curl up at the same time. Once the cone was completely covered I glued a little paper star to a toothpick for the top, and called this project finished. My mom made both the smaller red and green paper tree and the tree covered in buttons, she finished both of them in the time it took me to complete my one tree. Well in the time it took me to fail at my first attempt and then start over and succeed

There you have it an easy holiday decoration made entirely out of items we already had on hand. Simple and cute, if you don’t waste your time cutting out a million parchment paper squares that won’t stick that is!

Update: I shared this post!! There are some pretty awesome bloggers out there that host link-up parties and I took full advantage by sharing my post; here, here, here, here and here. If you found us though one of these link parties, well welcome to our blog, and leave us a comment telling us who sent you so we know who to thank!  Also, go check out some (or all) of these blogs they are all pretty great!