Paper trees....

I told you yesterday I was at my son's house for a few days.  Well, I didn't have the whole time off---I made several Christmas cards while there (I had pre-cut and pre-stamped them and just worked on assembling them).  I also took with me supplies to make the little Christmas tree on the back of the SU Holiday Mini.  Here is the first one I made.

I like to use purple and green for my Christmas colors so I used those colors in my designer series paper (DSP) for my tree and since I wanted 3 colors, I added pink to that. 

This tree uses a 9" foam cone as the core.  I am showing you the bottom of it here, so you can see the kind I mean. 

I bought pins with pearl heads to hold the circles of DSP on the tree.  They have these at Michaels and at WalMart.  For the tree, I have 13 rows.  The bottom row will be #1 and the top row is #13 since you start at the bottom adding circles and work upward, row by row.  Here are the sizes of circles I punched and how many I used on each row:

Row 1--12 ea---1-14" circle

2--12 ea---1-1/4"

3--11 ea---1-1/4"

4--11 ea---1"

5--11 ea---1"

6--10 ea---1"

7--10 ea---1"

8--9 ea--1"

9--10 ea---3/4"

10--10 ea---3/4"

11--10 ea---3/4"

12--8 ea---3/4"

13--9 ea--1/2"

I just used trial and error to decide how many and sizes to use on each row, so if you make a tree , you might add one or two more or less circles per row, depending on how much you overlap the circles.  For the top of the tree (see below) I punched a 1-1/4" circle and pinned it on.  And you could stand up a star or snowflake (3D) on top of that, too.

 After I made my pink, purple and green one and figured it all out, I made my son and daughter-in-law a set of three trees to leave with them. They like traditional red and green for Christmas so here are their trees. 

Their tallest is also 9" tall.  The two smaller ones are 5" cones.

 For their largest tree, I used the same size of circles and the same numbers of each.  I thought pearl-headed pins would be too dressy for their colors, so I bought white headed pins for these three trees.

 I decided I wanted different designs for each of the three trees, so for the second one (5") I used MOSTLY 1" circles and affixed each row in a diagonal curve around the tree.   I did not record how many of each one I used.  Sorry!

For the final tree (5") I decided to cover the entire tree with green circles first.  Here are how many and sizes per row (again, the bottom row - the largest row - is row 1 and the top row is row 9):
Row 1--12 ea--1" circle
2--11 ea--1"
3--10 ea--1"
4--9 ea--1"
5--10 ea--3/4"
6--9 ea--3/4"
7--9 ea--3/4"
8--8 ea--3/4"
9--9 ea--1/2"

After I got the tree covered with green rows, I went back and added a few red circles (1/2") all over the tree, so they looked like tree lights or ornaments. 

I hope these trees have inspired you to make some yourself!  I thought they were fun and pretty quick to make!

Thanks for visiting my blog today!! Smiles, Laura