Twas a few days after Christmas and all the stuff was on sale. I found these lovely 4 feet tall topiary Christmas trees and decided that I needed some topiaries for other seasons, too! I wanted spiral trees, about 4 feet high. I found just that online for $300/each and I wanted 2. Do you think I bought them? Nope, I made them. These were fairly time-consuming, but what they took up in time, they lacked in cost and they look amazing in our entry way.
I found this really long stick in my yard, about 9 feet. Don't ask me how you get a stick that long in one piece, I call it a sign that I needed to make these bad boys. I broke said stick in half. If you don't have enormous sticks in your yard, just go buy a $2 dowel rod, which is also 4 feet long (usually). I ordered these very Roman-looking plastic flower pots from Amazon. They were $9/each. Great price, and where else can you find flower pots in December? A pretty pot will add a lot to the look of this project. Conveniently, Amazon packed these pots in massive amounts of brown packing paper, in sections about 20 feet long. Originally, I was going to buy newspaper for this project, but the fine folks in the packaging department must have had their crystal ball out and read my mind, saving me that step and a few bucks. I took large gauge craft wire (the biggest I could find) and put it in the center of several layers of packing paper. The wire and paper were about 8-9 feet long at this point. You are eventually going to curl the paper around your stick, so it needs to be approximately double the length of your stick to look right. The craft wire helps the paper maintain shape & makes it a little more sturdy than it would be once you spiral it- thus get the biggest stuff you can find that is still flexible. I wanted the top of my topiary to be thinner & the bottom thicker, like a real tree, so I had only a few layers of paper at the top, adding more as I went down. I wound the paper around the craft wire and secured it with masking tape. It sounds more complicated than it actually is, but you can crunch the paper down tighter in the areas you want smaller and fluff it out where you want it bigger. I attached what was at this point 'paper cones' about 5 inches from the top to the top of the stick with more masking tape. Then I spray painted the paper cones green, just so the paper wouldn't show through. Try to keep the sticks (or dowel rods) brown for a more authentic look. It is ok if you try this and they look awful at this step. Mine certainly did.
I bought 13 bags of green Spanish moss at Walmart for $2.50/bag. I had some left over, but I'll use it for
another project. The moss was in clumps, so I stretched out the clumps best I could without tearing them apart and glued to the paper cones with hot glue. This took a LOT of hot glue. Surprisingly, the moss stayed very well. I thought I was going to have trouble with it falling off, but not so. After I had every inch of paper cone covered, in what was at this point, 'moss cone,' I filled up my plastic flower pots with plaster ($8 pail, enough for both flower pots) and stuck my sticks in the center. Make sure your stick is straight up. A crooked stick makes for a crooked topiary. Luckily the plaster hardened within 5 minutes, so I didn't have too long to stand there waiting for it to do it's thing.
Once your plaster is set with your stick firmly in place, spiral your moss cone around your stick. Voila, you now have a spiral topiary tree. I love these guys. My husband calls them Whoville trees. I guess they do look a little like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. And they only cost me $55 to make 2 of them. So we can eat this week AND have pretty decor. Break out the Who Hash!
No comments:
Post a Comment