Materials:

• Sticks
• Gardening shears
• Sharpie
• Hot glue gun  and glue
• Twine
• Scissors
• Snowflake string lights

Step 1. Layout

• Starting at the bottom, lay out your sticks from longest to shortest. This should give you a good idea of how tall your tree will be with the amount of sticks you have.

Step 2. Marking and cutting 

• Take your roll of twine and pull out enough twine to border the shape of your tree. Pull the twine tight enough to use it as a guideline.

• Take your sharpie or pencil and mark the sticks where they need to be cut along the guideline.Some of your sticks might have one jagged end and one finished end. If so, make sure to align the finished ends all on the same side so that you only have to mark and cut the stick once on the jagged end.

• Using your gardening shears, cut the sticks at the cut mark and put it right back in its place.  Do this to all of your sticks.

• Since we are going to glue the twine to the back of the tree, make sure to turn any ugly sides of the sticks facing up, so that the front looks the best.

Step 3.  Gluing on the backing

• Use hot glue to mount the twine about 1 inch from the edge of the sticks in a straight line. Try to keep the twine straight across the top of all the sticks. If some sticks are skinnier and don’t touch the twine, prop them up to the right height then glue them. This will help prevent your tree from hanging crooked.

• Continue this method until both sides are glued permanently to twine.
• Make sure you have about five or 6 inches of excess twine at the top of your tree. We will use this later to hang the tree.

Step 4.  Mounting the lights

• Carefully flip your tree over.  If everything is staying in place like it should, then you’re ready to glue on your lights.

• Poke the second light of your strand in from the back through to the front, near the top leaving the first light hanging behind the back of your tree.  Continue to poke your lights through from the back and glue them to the front where you like them.  Note: This particular strand had more lights than we needed, so we remove the bulbs from various lights and left them hanging out the back.

Step 5. Tidy up the back

• Once you have the lights where you like them, flip your tree around and glue the extra unused lights flat against the back so that they don’t show from the front.

Step 6. Secure the hanging point

• Take the excess twine at the top of your tree and tie a loose knot about 3 inches above the tree.

• Put a dab of hot glue in the middle of the loose knot and tighten it. This is what you will hang your tree from.

Step 7. Making the star

• Take some sticks that are skinnier than a pencil and cut them into five pieces about 4 inches long.

• Lay them out in the shape of the star and begin gluing the corners together, making sure to hold them until they are firmly glued.

• Finally, add glue to the center sticks so that the star is solid.

Step 8. Attaching the star

• Pull out the first light from your strand at the top of the tree and lay it flat.
• Add a nice big glob of glue to the base of the light and press the middle of your start firmly on the glue.

• Then glue the bottom two legs of the star to the top of your tree and hold it till it’s dry.

Step 9. Making the trunk

• Now using a thicker branch, cut a piece off for the trunk of your tree at your desired length.

• Heavily glue trunk to the bottom of your tree. Again, hold it until it is completely dry.

Watch our video tutorial on this…

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