a tree trunk for our little fake tree

Our christmas tree looks beautiful, but everytime I lay on our couch and look at it, I see one problem (and it's not the stuffed horse cat toy that mango regularly leaves under the tree)

My family always had (and still gets) a real christmas tree. As soon as we're out of an apartment, I plan to get one too. For the time being though, our little fake tree is just fine. Except for that one thing.

 

This is what I don't like. The green pipe extending out of the bottom of the tree. When I look at a christmas tree, I like to see a  stump! So I knew I wanted to do something to disguise it.

I did a lot of brainstorming and ended up with a project that was not only free, but came out awesome. Possibly my favorite craft to date.

I started with these materials. The sticks were found in small wooded area on the edge of my apartment complex, and the oat container was donated by my mom! I keep our oats in a jar, so the container is long gone.

The idea was to glue the sticks to the tube, and use the tube to wrap around the pipe of the tree.

 

I cut out a strip from the tube so I could wrap it around the pipe when I was done, and gave it a really quick coat of spray paint with a leftover can I already had so that the print wouldn't show through. If you wanted this to be really durable and had the means to cut piping, you could use a plastic pipe. I also would have liked to spray paint it brown rather than tan, but it was more important to me to use what I already had. 

WIth the sticks broken into straight-ish pieces and the spray paint dry, I used a glue gun to attach the sticks all around the tube, until I ended up with this:

I actually like it a lot even on its own, and I think you could use this same idea in a lot of other ways. Maybe attached around a set of glass canisters, with flameless candles inside? I'm imagining a set of three as a centerpiece with pine branches and white lights would be really pretty.
But this little branch tube had a place waiting for it, that ugly green pipe under our christmas tree.

I'm in love with it! It does a perfect job of combining the more elegant things I like (white lights, glass bulbs, sparkle) with the more rustic (pine branches, plants, sticks). I also love that our little (fake) tree looks almost like it's growing right out of the floor. And even though I thought I would only use it until we get a real tree in another year or two, I actually think it would look neat stretched around a tree stand too. I especially love it since this project was free (I already had the spray paint and glue gun glue). Gotta love a project that's free as well as pretty!