CONTROLLING Craziness: Felt Christmas Tree

I'm on a roll. Three blog posts in one week! We've being doing some Christmas crafty stuff and I want to make sure I share them with you guys before Christmas.

The latest thing I've made was a felt Christmas tree. I've had this idea pinned for years thinking I would make it for my now five year old, but never got around to it until a few days ago. So I made it for my one year old but my five year old likes it too. I've seen basically two different versions on Pinterest - a flat felt tree that is attached to the wall, or a 3 dimensional tree that sits on the floor. I decided to go with the 3D look since I didn't know where on the wall to hang up my tree, plus I worried that the kids would somehow tear the tree (and some drywall) off the wall.

I started with some green felt, folded in half and cut to make a semi circle.

I sewed the straight sides together and put it over top of my plastic container to make a 'tree'.

To make the tree shape, I taped some thin cardboard onto the top of this large food container as shown below.

The shape wasn't quite right, it was 'flowy' around the bottom so I stitched some darts around. I know it looks more like a green rocket ship, but the kids still like it. The little on quickly learned to put the shapes on the tree.

I also made a star for the top by cutting two star shapes and a semi circle shape out of yellow felt. I sewed the semi circle together the same way I did the tree. For the star, I sewed that leaving a bit of the bottom open. Then I turned it right side out and hand sewed the bottom of the star to the yellow cone.

Here are a bunch of ornament I made. Mostly shapes and I fancied them up by adding different layers of color to them. I also did the kids initials. My daughter said she needed more ornaments so I made some more just by cutting basic shapes out of the felt.

My five year old likes playing with this the most. Here she is getting the tree all decorated. I don't know if you can tell, but our Christmas tree in the background doesn't have many ornaments on the bottom. There's a reason for that - my toddler. I was hoping he'd play with this felt tree rather than the ornaments on our Christmas tree.

He likes to play with it alright. His version of playing is to rip all the felt ornaments off and let my daughter put them on again and again. Luckily she's a good sport about it and doesn't mind (too much).

I saw this cute video from Story of This Life the other day and it reminded me of what our toddler was doing to our tree and why most of the ornaments have been moved from the bottom of the tree.