How to Make a Paper Tree

I recently watched a do-it-yourself craft video on how to turn mop pads into trees. I don’t know what in the world made me watch it, as I had no real desire to make trees, or so I thought. But something in that video inspired me be crafty, and since trees were the subject of the tutorial, I was thinking trees.

I didn’t have any mop pads, any desire to go buy some, or the paint used in the video, but I wasn’t deterred. What I did have was cupcake liners and green water color paint, and other assorted stuff. And as it turns out, that was plenty. I made this craft 100% with stuff I had in the house.

Here’s a list of the items I used to make my tree:

Cupcake liners

Watercolor paint

2 AA batteries (I used AA, but AAA could have been used as well)

Masking tape

Cotton swabs

Branch

Hot glue gun

Drill

Now you may be looking at this list and thinking what???, especially with the batteries. How, you ask, are batteries used in this process? If you’ll be patient your question will be answered.

The first step was to paint the cupcake liners which would be the actual “tree”. I had two different green paints, and I put them in disposable bowls (mostly because the paints were almost dried out and I had to rehydrate them), then tried dipping and soaking the liners in the bowl. The color didn’t really take, and it made the liners too soft and mushy, where I knew I wanted them to still have some firmness to them.

So then I used cotton swabs to “paint” the liners. I randomly used both paint colors and moved the swab both vertically and horizontally. I didn’t care about streaks or missed areas.

Once I had the liners done, I had to think about creating a trunk. I roamed around in my back yard looking for a twig or branch, but nothing seemed to be either sturdy enough or the right size for the greenery.

Here’s where I used the batteries. Salvaged from my old battery pile (not thrown away because they’re not supposed to go into the garbage but not recycled yet), I grabbed two AAs, stacked them and wrapped them in masking tape. Then I painted the masking tape brown. A trunk!

When the paint on the cupcake liners was dry, I picked the one I liked the most to be the top of the tree, and cut a hole in the center of the other three, to slide them onto the trunk.

Starting from the bottom, I slid one of the liners over the trunk using a thin bead of hot glue to hold it in place near the bottom of the trunk, but not so low that it completely covered the trunk. With each of the next three liners I did the same thing, making sure they overlapped.

To put the tree top on, I kept approximately one inch above the top of the trunk, and pinched it into a point, before gluing it to the top of the trunk.

When the glue cooled and was set, I was able to fluff, pinch, and squish the cupcake liners into a shape I liked.

The hardest part of this project was setting the tree into the branch. I used the largest drill bit I had to make a starter hole in the branch, then kept enlarging it until it was big enough to hold the base of the trunk.

Plenty of hot glue, both in and around the hole, and on the trunk itself held it in place, and I sprinkled some of the sawdust created by the drilling to cover up any sign of the glue.

And that’s it. I didn’t decorate my tree, but a star sticker on top as a tree topper, paint and/or glitter or anything similar could easily turn this ordinary tree into a Christmas tree.

Altogether, this project took about one-and-a-quarter hours, and cost me nothing.