If there is one thing I love about Christmas themed scrapbooking, it's finding ways to create different styles of Christmas trees with my supplies. Almost every Christmas layout I make has a hand-made tree on there somewhere. Before I got my Silhouette I was limited to using strips or triangles or more simple shapes to create these trees, but now, there are very few limits to what I can do or create.
Supplies used - Cardstock: American Crafts; Patterned paper, chipboard pieces, and stickers: Simple Stories; Glitter cardstock: American Crafts; Gold puffy stickers: American Crafts; Evergreen branches cut file: Kristen Magee from the Silhouette Design Store; Embroidery floss: DMC; Circle punch: Fiskars; Computer font: Ariel
This layout design follows a concept that I use often with Christmas layouts. I have a large tree on one side with a photo block next to it. The tree design and the size and arrangement of the photo block changes, but that design concept stays the same. It makes designing and creating Christmas layouts easy when I somewhat already know what I'm going to do.
The tree I created has a lot of detail, but it's fairly easy to create if you have an electric die cutting machine. Here's how I created mine:
Step #1 - First I cut a bunch of the evergreen branches in a light green and a dark green patterned paper. The cut file I used comes with three different sizes of branches and I also resized some so that I had a large variety of sizes of branches from 1-1/2" long to 4" long.
Step #2 - Next I cut a 1/4 x 10-3/4" strip for the trunk and base of my tree and adhered it to my layout.
Step #3 - To give the tree a natural taper, I started adding the longer branches at the bottom and worked my way up to the top.
I wasn't worried about the layering of the branches just yet. First I wanted to have a base layer to create the shape of my tree.
I felt like it was easier to have a flat layer first and then I could go back and add more branches on top to fill in the rest of the tree.
Step #4 - After the base layer was adhered, I started adding in more branches to fill in the design.
Step #5 - To add some more detail to the tree I use my fingers to pinch the branches upward a little.
I also use foam adhesive to adhere some of the top layer branches for a little bit more dimension.
Step #6 - Every Christmas tree has to have a topper so I added a star to the top. I used wooden star layered on top of a patterned paper star with stitched border.
Step #7 - With the tree complete, it was time for the fun part - decorating it!
I used a combination of punched stars, chipboard stars, wooden stars, sequins, small glitter circles, and some puffy sticker stars.
To finish the layout I added a glitter scallop edge along the top and bottom of the page made up of half circles with a hand-stitched border.
I also added some details on the photo block that tie into the same details used to decorate the tree.
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