Just to let you know, I had a nice blog post all ready to give you yesterday and WordPress had a slight hiccup and somehow it all got lost. (So much for the automatic saving, right?)

Anyway, I apologize for the delay, but here’s what I was going to share with you yesterday but didn’t get around to retyping out. 

Here’s how I made my paper trees!

Now, since I didn’t come up with this idea, nor did I necessarily do a great job of explaining it, I’ll share this link. It’s the page I went to when I was learning this little craft. It’s pretty exciting to watch the video, ok, not, but it did help a lot, so that’s your choice.

Anyway, here’s what I did.

First of all, I used old magazines and catalogs, as well as a real estate booklet thing. I will say that it works better to choose magazines with binding instead of just staples because the pages tend to rip out of the staples as you fold, just a heads up.

Start by breaking the binding, bending it back and forth to make less of a definition of where the cover naturally opened and closed originally.

Then start folding each page the first time around by taking the top right corner down to the center fold, making a big triangle with a right angle on the left side, (yes, geometry will help later in life!) like this.

I think it worked better to move the pages around to the back of the stack (like the way you move the passed calendar pages down to the bottom so the top part isn’t so thick on the nail as the year goes on? Or is that example only work for me? Let me know if I’m alone in that little trick…) as you work your way through the book because otherwise, the side are very lopsided and I think it was easier to work with the folds if I kept it more level.

When you’re done with that, it should look something like this.

After you have all these initial folds done, go back and start round two. This time, you again take the right hand side and fold it into the center, making an even skinnier little triangle. It’s okay if it hangs over the bottom edge of your book. It’s supposed to do that.

Keep in mind that your pages will look different depending on what size book you started with.

Ok, again, I like to move the pages around as I go. But Martha doesn’t do that, so it’s up to you.

Next comes the hard part. Okay, it isn’t that hard, but it’s less easy. Because so far, my little cousins could do this on their own, all day, blindfolded. I’m kidding. But it is easy, no?

You have to fold the bottom part of this fold up to make it a right angle triangle again. I like to fold it up on the outside first, crease it, and then tuck it in. Martha just tucks it in all at once. But I thought that was too hard.

Then the harder part…

After that, you should be ready to set it up and fan out the pages to make it as full and round as possible.

Then you can paint or glitter all you want. Do it outside and let them air out as long as possible. Turns out that cheap spray paint plus spray glitter plus thin paper makes for a pretty smelly tree.

(Sorry, hubs.)

Or you can leave them as is, but they didn’t look that “Christmasy” to me, so I went with the paint.

 

I know the other trees were a bit cooler, so I’ll post about them soon.

It’s crazy here and everywhere, so posts may be fewer and far between until after the holidays. You’ll forgive me, right?