Pom Pom Christmas Trees

Although it's a little past Christmas, it's never too late to celebrate the winter season with a cute and festive pom pom tree! In this Instructable, we'll go over how you can make your own soft and squishy mini tree from easy to get materials. It's fun to play with and won't take up much space with its compact size. You can use your tree to decorate your desk or mantle with a tiny holiday scene.

Tree materials:

• Floral wire
• Yarn: You may want to get several colors of yarn to add contrast. I used Caron Simply Soft yarn in sage, dark sage, and off white, to make a classic looking dark fir tree with pops of color from a refreshing minty green and snowy white.

Tools:

• Scissors

Decorating materials:

• LED string lights
• Christmas ornaments

For this method, you will only need a pair of scissors and some yarn.

1. Start wrapping the yarn around your fingers. For larger pom poms, you should make bigger loops, so you should use more fingers.
2. Make at least 30-40 loops. The more yarn you use, the more likely your pom pom is to be fluffy and filled out.
3. Carefully slide the bundle of yarn off your fingers without unraveling the loops. Cut a piece of yarn about a few inches long, which will be used to tie across the center of the pom pom.
4. Tie the yarn around the center of the bundle of loops. Pull tightly and make a knot. To make it extra secure, flip the bundle of yarn over and tie a second knot on the back.
5. Use your scissors to cut the loops all around your bundle of yarn (cut on the yellow dotted line). You'll start to see the pom pom take shape.
6. Make sure to cut all the loops on both sides.
7. At this point, your pom pom will probably look like a bit of a mess! You can clean this up by trimming the edges to even out the lengths of the ends of yarn and make a nice round ball shape.

Making a multi-colored pom pom will be almost the same as making a single colored pom pom. The only difference is that you should wrap your fingers with two strands of yarn, using one of each color. The rest of the steps will be the same as before! Using this method, we can make pom poms that look like they have been dusted with a bit of snow.

Continue making pom poms in a variety of colors, so that you can get a good amount of contrast. I made 18 pom poms that are each about an inch in diameter to build a 5" tall tree.

1. Take a piece of floral wire and poke it into the center of your pom pom, then slide the pom pom onto the wire. Bend the end of the wire, so that your pom poms won't slide off the wire. This will be the top of your tree.
2. Slide on more pom poms onto the wire, alternating colors to keep the colors contrasting.
3. Start bending the wire into a conical spiral to form the tree shape.
4. Continue adding more pom poms and increasing the size of your spiral.
5. When you start running out of wire, take another piece of floral wire and poke it into the pom pom currently on the end of your tree to continue the strand. (In the image, red is the initial piece of wire and purple is the new wire).
6. Keep adding pom poms and shaping the tree until you're happy with its size!
7. When you're done, make a bend in the end of the wire so that the pom poms don't fall off.

You should now have a very fluffy and cute pom pom Christmas tree! Here are a couple shots from the front and back of my finished tree. If you're happy with your tree at this point, you can stop here, otherwise we'll continue on to decorating them!

When you put together your trees, you might consider using non-traditional tree colors for your yarn, such as reds, blues or pastel colors. You can also try experimenting with larger or smaller pom poms to get a different textured tree.

I wrapped my trees with tiny LED string lights to decorate. I also hung some small Christmas ornaments around the tops of the trees for a little extra flair.

To set the rest of the scene, you can try scattering tiny pom poms or arrange other ornaments around.

Some other ideas on how you can decorate that aren't pictured above:

1. Tie a small gift bow around your tree
2. Top your tree with a tiny santa hat
3. Wrap a strand of mardi gras beads around
4. Place a pair of sunglasses on your tree

I hope you enjoyed this Instructable! Please feel free to comment below and share any images of your tree!