The holidays are bountiful, but perhaps your square footage isn’t – finding a way to decorate your apartment or house can be a challenge, but Patons is here to help with DIY holiday wall decor! Today we’re bringing you a start-to-finish tutorial on how to make this festive holiday tree. The good part? It goes on your wall, so you don’t have to step around it! The better part? It’s made of yarn! The best part? It’s unbelievably simple! Everything you see is made of yarn and/or cardboard. MATERIALS Patons Classic Wool Roving Yarn in as many shades as you like (we used nine) Patons Classic Wool Worsted Yarn Painter’s tape Measuring tape 9 mm crochet hook 3M Command strips For decorations in later steps: *Cardboard scraps *Scissors *Large-eyed, blunt-tip needle *Hot glue (optional) Part 1: Making the Tree Step 1: Tracing the Tree Get out your painter’s tape and a step-ladder or step-stool. Decide where the tree should go and how large it should be – it can be tiny or it can be huge, it’s all up to your tastes! Use your tape to outline the tree on the wall. This is just going to be used as a guideline. We let our Programming Quality Assurance guy (henceforth known as Mr. QA) eyeball this one and it was freakishly symmetrical. Color us impressed! Once you’re happy with your tree, get out your measuring tape! Measure the length of all the painter’s tape from start to finish. This number is how long you will need to make the tree outline. After that, measure your tree’s stump for the same reason. Keep these numbers on a piece of paper near by. Next up: 3M Command Strips! These are great because they’re easy to put up and take down, and are sure to stay on your wall through the holidays. We used two packs of Command Decorating Clips and one pack of larger clear hooks. Using the painter’s tape as a guide, we placed hooks at each corner of the tree, removing the tape as we went. Make sure you follow the Command Strip instructions as you go along so they stay firmly and can be taken down cleanly. As you can see, each section’s corner has a hook. TIP! When placing the hooks, think about which angle your tree will be hung: you’ll be placing the yarn on the hook from the outside in so it has good tension. Step 2: Creating the outline Now that you know where your tree’s going, it’s time to have some fun! Take two strands of your favorite Patons Classic Wool Roving shade to use as the tree outline, as well as a 9 mm crochet hook. We decided to go for Pacific Teal – it’s on-trend, modern, and we love a good teal. Plus, it looks great on our office’s off-white walls! Holding the two strands together, make a slip knot. Put your crochet hook in the knot and chain loosely. This is where your measurements from before come into play: chain for the whole length of your tree! When you’ve reached the end, chain an extra foot just in case you come up short. Cut a long tail, but don’t tie off the final chain yet. Put the outline aside. Yes, this is our entire tree! Tip! You don’t have to stick with two strands of the same shade. Mix it up if you like – playing with traditional holiday shades or neutrals, personalize it to your own style! Once you’ve finished chaining the tree, chain the stump and garland. For the garland, we eyeballed the length and would hold it against the wall until it was long enough. Step 3: Placing the outline Using the guide above, begin at the top of your tree and place the tree outline in the hooks. We placed the back loops of the chain in the hooks, but you can put whichever section you prefer. When you get back to the top of your tree, you should have a few extra chains. Simply unravel them until the chain ends at the top hook once more, tie it off, and slide it on. And… ta-da! You now have a beautiful tree! If minimalism is more your pace, feel free to end here Part 2: Making Yarn Decorations We used two kinds of pompoms in this project: the large (no, seriously – it’s huge) star and the garland fork pompoms. Step 1: Making the star Usually we suggest making a pompom around a piece of cardboard or your hand, but we wanted our star to go down in history as One Huge Pompom. Our Web Designer had a great idea – instead of wrapping the yarn around her hand she wrapped a strand of Yellow around the 8.5” x 11” picture frame from her desk. Then we used hot glue and stuck a piece of circular cardboard on the back. How you hang your “star” is up to you – we were able to simply slide it on the hook at the top of the tree. You could also tape it up, nail it or put a hole in the cardboard and hang it that way. Step 2: Using a fork to make tiny garland pompoms To make the garland pompoms super small, we used complimentary shades of Patons Classic Wool Worsted. Then we simply tied the pompoms to the garland! We spaced them four chains apart and double-knotted through the back loops of the chains. Step 3: Using cardboard as a base The possibilities for this are endless! You start with a very basic plan: you’re going to cut out coardboard… and then you’re going to wrap yarn around it. We found Patons Classic Wool Roving worked perfectly for this because it’s so thick and squishy! Once the decorations were done we put some more hooks on the wall and hung them up. Here are some of the ideas we came up with: A square or a rectangle makes for the perfect gift! A little more shaped, the candy cane looks delicious when wrapped with alternating shades of Cherry and Aran. You can even go abstract! Mr. QA surprised us with this birds’ nest, made out of one piece of cardboard TIP! When you have some exposed cardboard on the side, covering it up is a cinch! Part 3: Enjoy your fabulous and fuzzy new tree! The possibilities with these techniques are endless – instead of a tree, think of everything you could make! * Reindeer, snowmen, gingerbread house * A Menorah * Child’s initials for a nursery * Palm-pom trees (ha!) What are you going to make on your wall? Tell us your ideas, we’d love to hear them! FEATURED YARNS
