Thread Christmas Tree

Growing up, I had a wonderful Christmas tree that was the highlight of every December. However, when I shifted countries, we had to give it away and we never had one again.

This year, I made it my aim to create a Christmas tree out of materials lying around the house. Not only is this more sustainable, it also brings more festive joy when you spend close to nothing on it!

Necessary materials include:

1. Green embroidery thread (a mix of colours or a single colour will work)
2. Brown embroidery thread (for the trunk)
3. Scissors (the thread cutting type pictured here works better, but normal scissors is fine too)
4. A gluestick cap or anything that looks like a trunk

Other than this, you will need some more materials, but these are optional:

1. Colourful beads
2. A needle OR Fevicol (either one suffices)

if you're already familiar with making DIY pompoms, this shouldn't be too hard.

Holding two fingers around 2 cm apart, starting coiling your green embroidery thread around them until it forms a thick band as pictured. You may need to coil it 100-200 times. Remember, the more you coil, the bushier your tree!

Next, remove your fingers from between the coil, while keeping the coil intact, and tie a bit of thread around the middle of the coil.

!YOU NEED TO TIE THE THREAD AROUND THE FULL COIL, SORT OF LIKE A MESSY BOWTIE!

With your coil secure, now cut the coiled part as shown so that your coil now looks like the second picture. The key to this is cutting small batches of thread at a time so that your fingers don't get too tired and the scissors don't lose their edge either.

Now that you have a flattened coil, you'll need to trim it to form a circle as shown. Don't worry too much about the neatness. When it all comes together, it won't matter as much! This will form the base shape for our tree.

For my tree, I've created 6 such bases, with the tiniest of them being the fluffiest. These will not be stacked to form your tree!

You will have to stack the bases in order and join them. For this, there are two alternatives:

1. Thread a needle through the entire stack. This may be harder to do if your stacks are too tight (as they should be!) However, the benefit of this is that the entire tree is sturdy and made of thread!
2. The second alternative is to use glue to stack the entire tree together and wait, for it to dry. This however may not be as sturdy or as satisfying, but is a good alternative to glue!

Once done, you can trim your tree again to satisfaction.

If you have used a thread to join your stacks, you will have to perform an extra step of creating a hole in your erstwhile trunk, as shown in the first picture.

if not, go ahead and start covering the cap in glue and slowly coil the brown embroidery thread around it to cover it completely, giving it the look of a trunk.

Now that this is done, either thread the trunk to the top of the tree or glue them together, (I went a step ahead and did both!)

Tie of the thread at the base and voila you're done!

In this step, I used the beads, threads and a bit of wire to fashion a few decorations for my tree. It isn't the best looking tree, but it is a wonderful workaround!