Just Us Four {christmas tree how to}

Hi all! I'm Shannah from Just Us Four.  I'm so excited to be here for Christmas break!  A big thanks to Ginger for letting me come share one of my recent projects with her fabulous readers. Today, I am sharing a few ways to transform Styrofoam trees into great Christmas decorations.  First, let's start with our tree...I was able to find some of my trees at the Dollar Tree and others had to be purchased from Michaels.  Generally, the Dollar Tree has one to two small sizes while Michaels offers a much broader assortment.  Here are some of my Michaels trees {pardon the basement appearance}.

We'll work with a small one from the Dollar Tree first.

For this one, I grabbed some cupcake liners in holiday prints.

Then, I cut the center out of them by slicing to the middle and cutting the little circle out.

Once I had all the centers removed, I wrapped the outer portion of the liners around my tree in layers.

I used one of the center circles to cover the top of my tree.  Then, I put two mini lifesaver mints on the top as the "star".

On my next tree, I got some textured yarn to wrap around.

The yarn had three different textures.  I just started at the base of the tree and wrapped all the way up to the top.

Tree #3 got some snowflake ribbon for the exterior.  Similar to the yarn, I just started at the base and wrapped to the top.  Then, I used a little snowflake cupcake topper as the "star".

For my last tree, I bought some beaded garland.

It was pulled too tightly to actually use it to wrap around the trees like the yarn or ribbon though.  So, I cut the string and ended up with a bowl full of beads.

No worries...hot glue to the rescue!  I grabbed my hot glue gun and started gluing the beads on.  Then, disaster struck.

Yep, the tip of my tree came off.  I tried gluing it back on with some foam glue but it just didn't sit correctly.  So, I switched to a paper mache tree to finish out the project.  Glue, glue and more glue.

The little cupcake liner tree sits just outside of my powder room in a little cutout.

The other three live on the shelf in our powder room together.

So, there you have it...4 ways with Styrofoam (or paper mache in a pinch) trees!  Thanks for reading and please come visit me over at Just Us Four!  Merry Christmas!