We had a Christmas Craft party at our church a few weeks ago hosted by our Women's Ministry and you could choose from 4 different crafts to make during the two hour event. I chose to make a tree skirt because I've actually never had a real tree skirt. I've used fabric in all of my 15 years of decorating my own tree. It's always worked and I never wanted to spend the $40 to $50 on a tree skirt. Heck, who am I kidding? I have admired one in the Ballard catalog for so long I feel like it's mine but at $98.00? It will just have to remain there on those shiny pages.
Back to the story! The lady who was helping oversee the tree skirt suggested that we buy 3 yards of a fabric of our choice. I went to Hancock Fabrics and chose 3 different Christmas-y fabrics in my favorite Christmas colors: red, lime green, and white. I also decided to add a piece of trim to the bottom of my skirt so I bought 3 yards of wide ric-rac. I had a coupon so ended up only spending $23.00 for the 3 yards of fabric and ric-rac. We were going to be cutting our fabric into 4 inch strips and hot gluing them to an old tree skirt. (I had to go buy a cheap one at Dollar General.)
Pretty cute for $5.00 at the DG!
All my supplies: red, green, white strips of fabric, wide ric-rac, and lots of glue sticks!
I began working at the bottom of the old cheap tree skirt and ran a 4-5 inch line of hot glue across the bottom edge of the tree skirt. Then I quickly took my green strip of fabric and placed it on the hot glue and bunched it up to make it look like it was gathered with a sewing machine stitch. I held it in place until it was semi dry and then kept going around the bottom of the skirt. Once I got all the way around the bottom of the skirt, I started a new row with my white fabric and did the same exact thing: ran a 4-5 inch line of hot glue and began bunching my white strip of fabric until it looked like it was gathered. I placed each row of fabric about 3 inches above the row below it so that it slightly overlapped. I worked my way up the tree skirt with each color of fabric until I had 2 rows of each color. I forgot to take pics along the way but remembered to do so on my final row (thank goodness!) My little fingers were beginning to get sore from all that hot glue bunching!
Then it was time for me to work on my trim piece: the wide ric-rac. I started out by putting a thin line of hot glue on the backside of the entire top edge of ric rac and placed it on the trim. After a few inches of doing this I realized I was going to be using a lot more ric rac than I had so I started placing a dot of glue at the top part of the ric rac and just placing it on my green fabric where it would touch the edge.
Hindsight is definitely 20/20 on this project. Once I was done I realized it would have been easier to put my trim piece on my green fabric either before I started with the whole project or maybe not gather (or bunch up) my fabric quite as much as I did. Regardless of my hindsight I think that it turned out adorable and looks so sweet under my tree. I love that it's my style and matches my Christmas decor perfectly in our kitchen.
This is a little 4 foot tree that I put in our kitchen. All of our handmade ornaments go on this tree and it is so special to me. The kids pre-school craft ornaments go on this tree and some of them are so simple but are so precious! It is one of my absolute favorite things that I decorate for Christmas each year.
I'm sharing this over at http://www.homestoriesatoz.com/tutorials/tutorials-tips-link-party-88.html so you can link up a post of your own if you want! Come check everything out!
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