Pink Paper Cone Tree Tutorial

I keep seeing these trees pinned on Pinterest, but it seems a lot of people use the foam cones. I'm living under a rule right now - no craft stores so that I can more easily resist the urge to buy even more scrappy supplies! This brought me to a very successful trial run with making paper cone trees from cereal boxes. 

While not rocket science by any means, I thought I'd share with you how I went about making the tree. 

My supplies:

• hot glue gun
• hot glue sticks
• cereal box
• one 12x12 sheet
• lots of scraps cut into .75x6 in strips 
• ribbon

1. Cut open the cereal box and lay flat. I cut that long flappy (one of the two smaller panels) on the far left off first, save it because I use it in the next step.

2. Using the panel as a guide, mark off your next end point, creating two equal sides to what will be our triangle/cone.

 3. I was experimenting remember, so I drew to curves to be the third side. More on that in a bit.

4. Cut the cone. FYI: I cut that bigger section first and then wrapped it into a cone shape. It was to steep of a curve, so I slowly trimmed off strips and ended up roughly where the smaller curve was drawn.The main thing here is that you want the cone to sit flat and not really leaning.

5. Cute little cone, I glued it into shape with my hot glue gun. (My kids really like that cereal so I happened to pull it out of the recycling bin for this project.)

6. As much as they love the cereal, I didn't love the look. So I covered the cone with some MME paper that's been in my stash for ages.

7.  I ran a bead of hot glue down one side, wrapped the paper around and adhered the other end onto the cone. I tucked the excess that hung off the bottom into the cone itself. If you look at this pic you'll see how it had a cornucopia shape, that's the part I tucked. ;)

8. Loosely fold the paper strips in half and give a dab of hot glue. Stick onto the cone tree, alternating colors in whatever order you fancy. I tried to offset subsequent layers of strips so it wouldn't have obviously lines going up and down the cone. I also decided, on the third layer, to trim it an inch to help give it a more tapered look. So every two layers I went down an inch. 

9. My ribbon topper was made by tying a bow and then using the ends of the bow to tie a second one across the top of the other. I just hot glued it onto the tip.

Thanks for stopping by! 

Don't forget that today, December 15, is the last day to sign up for my Christmas present giveaway.