Anthropologie Christmas Tree Hacked

I saw this tree for $48.00 on Anthropologie.  It is cute, but not that cute.  So, I was inspired to create a new weekly blog feature where I will hack high end crafts and show you the cheap and easy tutorials for making them. 

Supplies

wooden shish kabob skewer

wooden shape for base

old book

scissors (preferably decorative edge)

glitter - optional

hole punch

cardboard

ink pad for aging (optional)

beads/ornament for topper

So everything I used I already had right here at home. 

 1) I used an old book of poetry.  The size of your tree is limited by the dimensions of your book.  With this book, the largest piece I could cut was 5 1/2"x 5 1/2".  I used a craft knife to cut the pages out of the book.  The original uses sheet music.  I used a book with heavy pages so that it would hold up well.  If you have a really old book, then you will not even need to use ink to age the pages.

2) Cut your squares starting with your largest size - here 5 1/2" with the decorative scissors.  I cut 4 of each size.  The dimensions went down by 1/4" increments.  So, the next size I cut was 5 1/4" and so on until I got down to 1" squares. 

3) Next, Kamille inked all of the pages for me, which is a great way to get your kid's help.

4) You can see all of the pages have been inked.

5) I took a small wooden cut out of a star (it can be anything - even a piece of heavy cardboard) and a skewer from the kitchen.

6) Glue the skewer onto the wood with a big glob of hot glue.  I initially planned to put it into a small wooden bead for extra support but I could not find them anywhere so I just used a huge glob of hot glue.  I'm pretty impatient so I cooled it off really quickly with compressed air, but you can just hold it there until it is dry.   

7) Next, I used an old usps box that someone sent paperwork in to make the separators.   Any old cardboard or foam core or thin Styrofoam will work.  Cut it down into 1" squares. 

8) Then I layered 1 book sheet and 1 square.  They just poke down onto the skewer. 

9) Here you can see how it starts to build up really quickly.  Just spiral the pages as you go. 

10) When you get up to the top where the pages are under 2" you need to cut the cardboard squares a bit smaller.  When the squares get small they get hard to stab onto the skewer so I actually punched a small hole into each square of cardboard for the last few on the tree.

11) The tree might be shorter than the skewer, depending on what size pages you started with.  Just cut the top off with scissors about 1" from the top. 

12) Finally, I glued some beads on as my topper.  The original used a small glass Christmas ornament with the metal hanger removed.  You could use a star, a tiny angel, whatever you want.  I like glitter, so I used some scrapbook glitter glue on the edges.