31 Days of Handmade Christmas Gifts: Day 15 - Oh Christmas Tree

What would Handmade Christmas Gifts be without a handmade Christmas tree?  Today's gift combines both the tree and the book page idea together.

You will need:

• Book to rip up
• Glue gun and hot glue sticks
• 12 X 15 cardboard
• Twine

Again, I had to go to the store to find a book to rip up.  Dollar General had Webster's Dictionary for only $1.25.  This project only uses about a third of it, so stay tuned for more gifts using the book pages!

You could use a foam cone, but I'm too cheap to do that, so  I decided to roll my own from the cardboard insert from my 12x15 Scrapbook pages.  FREE is always good!  I glued it together really good with the glue gun and then cut that bottom triangle off to make it stand up straight.  This took me a couple of tries to get it straight.

I then took the cover off the book and used chocolate brown chalk to chalk up the edges of the pages.

Rip off one page at a time, roll it into a tube and glue it shut.  then glue it to the bottom of the cone.

Keep going around the cone until that bottom of the cardboard doesn't show anymore.  I even folded some of the pages in half and stuck them up from the bottom to get full coverage.  At this point, my daughter said it looked like a pretty skirt!

Move up with your row and fill in the next layer.  Then another row until you reach the top.

Oh, somewhere in there, I decided that I needed to use that corner that I cut off to fill in the gap in the cone.  It seemed a little unstable and rocking a little, so I just glued it in the gap.

Here's a picture of the bottom so you can see what that looks like.

It kinds of looks like a raggedy tree, so I just tied a bow at the top with a piece of thick twine.  I put a dot of glue on that to hold it in place.  What a cute gift to give, don't you think?

Check out those blogs on the right that I follow.  Also, watch my Etsy shop on the left for things that I've made here, if you don't want to make your own!