Mini White Birch Grove

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend.

Now it’s down to the serious business of decorating for Christmas.

Here’s my first project for the season. I’m hosting a table at a Tea Party at church Friday night. I created these mini birch trees for favors and centerpiece for the table.

The table will be done in red and white and we are using polka dot plates (oh how I love polka dots).

The trees are pretty simple to make.

Start with some wood dowels. I cut my 4 foot dowels into 3 trees.

Then drill hole in the dowels to insert your brances.

Then I painted the dowels off white and added some bark “detail” with a brown marker (I referred to photos of white birch trees online).

Then insert your pipe cleaners through the holes. I used the kind of sparkly iridescent ones. I started with lengths about 11” and went shorter as I worked my way up the trees.

I used silver and red beads for ornaments. Just slide them on. I found some that were a little less expensive in the kid’s craft area.

You can use all different kinds of bases. I found these ceramic boxes at the Dollar Tree and removed the lid, inserted a piece of florl foam so that it was a tight fit and then inserted the base of the tree.

I covered the floral foam with some little squares of white chenille that I had on hand. I will add a little glue on the underside of the chenille to keep it from shifting (I can see in my photos that the green is peeking out).

A fun project that you can do in a lot of different variations. The kids can get involved too.

I have such a thing for white birch trees. I remember beautiful groves of them when we visited Colorado.

They just say “Christmas” to me.

Hope your week is off to a great start.

Cori