Paper Trees for Your Holiday Mantle

Hi everyone! Practical Scrapper Alison here with a project that has been in my "to do basket" for 2 years now. Do you have any of those? A scrappy friend of mine refers to them as UFO's - Unfinished Objects! I'm sure I have more UFO's than FO's!!
Anyway, this was the year to realize my vision for these ...

Three Styrofoam cones and a pack of battery powered lights.

I've seen many examples of paper trees on blogs and Pinterest over the years so I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do, my only conundrum was how to work the lights in.

Thank goodness for washi tape! I used it to tack down the lighting wires until I could wrap the paper strips around it. The other two cones got covered in some patterned paper first and then paper strips.

I wasn't sure how to cut my paper to the correct shape at first and then it rolled around my desk and gave me the idea to trace it's path. Below is a close up of tracing line. 

I cut out the curved shape and then glued it to the cone with hot glue.

By placing a line of hot glue along one edge and slightly around the upper corner, I was able to place the cone on it and just roll it up, gluing as I went. No hot glue burns for once!

Here's what the the cones looked like before I started adding all the paper strips to them. In hind sight I wish I had wrapped the larger cone in paper before attaching the lights ... live and learn!

And now a word about my paper. I wanted to use multiple shades of green but as I was looking through all my green papers (yes, I arrange my papers by colour!) I realized that I needed BOTH sides of the paper to be green which most patterned papers are not. What to do? My stash to the rescue once more! Stampin' Up makes these great paper stacks of tone on tone patterned papers in each of their colour stories. As a former Demonstrator I have all these colour stacks so went through them and pulled out all the green papers. Then I started cutting them into strips of varying widths.

Once my strips were cut I created a fringe on one edge (fringe scissors would have been very helpful for this step!), added double sided tape to the non-fringed edge and wrapped it around my cone. Each strip was layered above the other by approximately 1/4 to 1/2 inches. These created a nice waterfall effect. To create the curls I simply used my bone folder and swiped it down each little strip of paper - just like you do when you're curling a ribbon with scissors for a parcel.

A topper made from a paper rosette and a bit of Gold Lame Color Shine spray finished things off and now they are ready to hang out on my mantel this Holiday Season. You can't really see the lights in this photo but the larger cone does have lights. It looks pretty cool too! I was trying to place my paper strips in a careful manner making sure each light would peak out but eventually just gave up and I found that as I was curling all the paper, the lights appeared! Love it when stuff like that happens!

So there you have it. One UFO finally complete. 1,930,298 to go! 

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful Wednesday!