Winter Trees

This post may seem a little late, but I'm a fan of winter time decorations, not just stuff that I have to take down after Christmas or else it will look out of place.  Although I will readily admit that my tiny fake Christmas tree is still proudly displayed by our window.  What?  It's festive and happy looking!  You can never get enough of that here in the gloomy days of winter.

I've been seeing all these cute ornament trees on the interwebs and wanted something similar for myself.  The only problem is that those ornaments are usually breakable, and breakable doesn't fly well in this household.  I swear, we're not going to have to do anything to baby proof the house when we have kids after all of the animal proofing we've done.

Back to non-breakable stuff.  Right around Christmas I was in Michael's and saw they had beaded garland on super clearance; I think it was 80¢ for a 6' length or something like that.  The idea popped in my head that I could use this to decorate the trees; it's shiny and not breakable, which were basically my only requirements. 

I snagged a handful of the garland in silver and green, picked up 3 different size styrofoam cones (paper mache would be better but they didn't have any at this store and I was all excited to get started) and made my way to the register.

I started by covering the cones with paper using Mod Podge to give myself a better surface to adhere things to and to make the tops a little taller and pointier.

After that dried I painted them silver since you would be able to see some spaces between the beads.

When that dried I busted out my hot glue gun and got to work.  I started at the bottom and worked my way around and up.  I recommend putting a strip of hot glue and then sticking on the beads for the entire thing.  I tried to do a short cut on my smallest tree and only glue the strands on one side of the cone and it turned out a little wonky and didn't feel very sturdy afterward.  I made sure each bead was glued down on the bigger trees and it turned out much neater and feels very solid.  Later I filled in the gaps on the smaller tree with hot glue to make sure everything was held in place.

So that's it!  My shiny winter trees in pretty winter colors.