DIY Felt Christmas Tree

I love holidays.  I enjoy pretty much all of the big ones, but I have to say that Christmas is my favorite.  I love watching Christmas movies (Elf is my favorite), drinking hot chocolate, wrapping presents, decorating the house, and putting up the Christmas tree.  This year Christmas is even more exciting because it is Jude’s first Christmas and I’m really looking forward to going all out.  Except there is one problem- having an almost 10 month old who crawls, is about to walk, and still puts everything in his mouth makes having a Christmas tree just about the biggest safety hazard you can think of.   I brainstormed ways we could still have one- we could put in the kitchen with is gated off, I could find a way to put it up somewhere really high, we could put it outside on the front porch, etc.  But nothing seemed like it would really work or be practical.  So this year instead of a real Christmas tree we made a felt Christmas tree!

This was such a fun, cheap, easy project.  As far as supplies we used:
2 yards of green felt to make the tree (On sale ended up being about $8 total)
10-15 multicolored pieces of felt for the ornaments (4 pieces for $.50 total about $8)
Tacky Glue to stick it all together (already had)
4 Nails to put the whole thing up (already had)
Masking Tape (already had)
Sharp scissors (already had)
Total cost about $16!

First I took the two yards of green felt and folded it in half length wise.  I wanted to cut what was now the large rectangle diagonally so I took some masking tape and used it to make a straight line to guide my cutting.  Then we just nailed the big green tree to the wall.  Now, we nailed ours because I know Jude will tug on it and I didn’t want him to pull it off the wall/end up with a push pin in his mouth etc, but if you had older kids then you could totally use push pins or those doubled sided sticky tab things.

The ornaments were a ton of fun to make.  Our awesome friends Rex and Tara came over to help us make them and they turned out so great.  I love them all.  All we did was cut out the shapes we wanted to make and used tacky glue to stick them together.  Then we just put them on the tree.  The cool thing about felt is that it sticks to its self, so all of the ornaments are just sticking to the tree with no glue or Velcro or anything like that.  So Jude can decorate or undecorate the tree as much as he’d like.  We did glue the string of lights directly to the tree so that way he wouldn’t mess them up.  We also put all of the more complicated ornaments up higher where he couldn’t reach and all of the single piece ones down low.  So far Jude really loves pulling the ornaments down, but he doesn’t get that he can put them back yet.  Maybe next year.
 
And now, the big reveal!

I think in this last picture with Jude you can get a sense of the scale of the tree, it’s really big!  It ended up being about 6ft tall, which is great for us, but you could easily make one smaller or whatever size you like!  That’s another thing I love about this project, it is so easy to customize to what you need.  If you arn’t that artistic just make really simple ornaments, or if you have older kids, get them to craft with you.  You could cut out the shapes in advance and have smaller kids glue them together if they arn’t ready to handle sharp scissors yet.  And we arn’t religious so our tree isn’t full of symbolism, but you could totally go that way too with this.  Or have all of the ornaments match the color scheme of your house/living room or whatever.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed my new project and be sure to tell me if you end up making one too!
-Liz