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December 2, 2007

Pom Pom Christmas Tree

Filed under: Christmas,Kids Projects — sarah @ 3:07 pm

I was trying to work out some easy Christmas craft things for my Scouts to make, having got hold of lots of pipe cleaners, coloured lolly sticks, and pom poms in assorted Christmas colours and sizes. I decided to make a pom pom Christmas tree. Lolly pop christmas tree

First off I selected three green pom poms, each one slightly bigger than the last, some metallic/shiny pipe cleaners to be the tinsel and star on the top of the tree and selected christmas shapes – again metallic – and the sort you would find in table conffetti, a yellow lolly stick for the trunk and also to act as the strength in the structure. As this would be a project for children I used PVA glue.

Christmas tree bits

I stuck the pom poms in size order onto the lolly stick, starting with the smallest right at the top of the stick, then the medium pom pom (making sure it also touched the small pom pom), then the large one. I put glue on the stick and between the pom poms. This gave the basic shape of the tree, complete with trunk.

pop poms stuck

Now you should definitely wait for the glue to completely dry before moving onto the next stage but I got impatient and so started attaching the pipe cleaners as tinsel, resulting in the pom poms sliding around in the glue. I got round this by using the pipe cleaners to ‘hug’ the pom pom to the stick. This would have been necessary anyway in order to get the pipe cleaners to sit in a realistic way on the tree.

I also cut the pipe cleaners in half to get a manageable length of ‘tinsel’ for the tree. I fashioned one of the spare pieces of gold pipe cleaner into the star for the top of the tree by folding it into thirds (making sure there was a bit spare at one end) and then folding each of those thirds in half again. I then stretched it out into a star shape, making sure the folds were ‘sharp’, so that the star had proper points. I was aiming for a five-point star so I overlapped two of the sections and twisted them together to make a continuous shape. The spare bit came down as the piece to attach to the tree.

star for tree

I then glued lots of the table confetti shapes on to the tree to be the baubles and decorations, including the silver snow flakes.

bobbles added

I then attatched the star but found that I should have stuck it onto the lolly stick behind the smallest green pom pom. Fortunately I had been impatient so the glue was still wet and I could still insert the star.

Tree with star

It is not the best thing I’ve ever produced but when thinking things up for the kids I try not to be too careful as a sort of test to see if they’ll be able to produce the same thing. I think it works as a Christmas tree and that others could probably produce a more sophisticated version, using the same materials and this simple idea.

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