You will need:
- Pages of a book, approx 30, with either glue or fabric binding
- Acrylic paint (I used a cheap set from The Works)
- Either a paintbrush, or a material that will spread paint with minimal absorbing
- Small gems (I got mine from Paperchase)
- Micro beads
- Tweezers
- PVA glue, or stronger, in a fine tip dispenser (or in a puddle on some greaseproof paper)
- Foam pad
- Plastic star or similar
Making the booktree
You'll need pages that are either bound together, or well glued. They will need to be able to stand a bit of pulling and twisting, so if they're glued, make sure they're well embedded in the glue.
Take the chunk of pages, and fold the top right corner of the front page into the "spine" of the chunk, as below:
Then, fold the page into the spine again, which looks like this:
Then fold the bit that sticks out at the bottom up, parallel with the bottom of the remaining pages:
Continue folding the pages: very quickly they will start forming the tree shape, and it can soon hold itself up:
Make sure you push each fold into the spine as well as possible: the closer to the spine you can get it, the better/sharper the folds at the tip of the tree (where you can see them most) will be:
Once you've folded all the pages, you can decorate it. I used a green acrylic paint, on a little, very non-absorbent sponge chunk, but a paintbrush (not heavily laden, you don't want the pages being soaked, but to almost dry-brush the edges):
Brush down the page edges from the top, and up from the bottom until they're all well coloured, and select your decorations - I used red micro beads and green and white gems, but you could use bits of tinsel, glitter etc.
Next, use the fine nozzle glue dispenser to start decorating. Add blobs of glue scattered randomly around the tree on the painted edges:
Add your micro beads/gems/other decorations. The gems have a tendency to try and slip to one side or the other when the glue is still wet, so keep an eye on them and straighten them up if they try to do that:
Making sure the paint is dry, put the foam pad on the top of the tree:
And then add your star. Done! I promise it looks better in real life, and daylight!
It can also be folded/clamped flat for easy posting - just make sure you wait until the glue has dried before jiggling it about :)
Also, you can either pull the two opposite sides to each other and glue/pin together to make a fully round tree, or put two back-to-back to make an entire tree.
