DIY Felt Christmas Tree Craft

A couple years ago I put together a moms craft night where we made these adorable felt Christmas trees! These trees are so great for toddlers and young elementary kids and it takes some attention off messing with the main Christmas tree because they can decorate and un-decorate this one as much as they want! This craft night took a TON of prep and I had a bunch of friends who pitched in and helped. I had been doing the crafts for my moms group so I had a good sense of what was feasible in a 2-hour craft night.

This is such a great activity for a moms group or group of friends because you can buy all the supplies at once and divvy them up. It’s also a great craft kit you can assemble and send to friends as Christmas gifts! I made some kits after my craft night and sent them to friends and they were a huge hit!

I’ll walk you through how the ladies put together their trees at the event and explain the prep work as I go.

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THE TREE

I bought yards and yards of green felt from JoAnn’s (wait for sales and use coupons!). I also bought the other main colors like white, tan, brown, red and yellow by the yard. In the picture below you can see four different tree shapes. I made templates for each tree shape out of poster board. The templates were half the tree shape, I had the ladies fold their green felt piece in half, trace the template, then cut, that way their tree was nice and symmetrical.

THE ORNAMENTS

I decided to have ornaments precut and all the supplies for each mama to decorate them how they wanted. Precutting the ornaments was the most time consuming part but I had lots of friends help out and we found the best system was to use freezer paper. Let me explain: I made the stencils out of stiff cardboard, we laid freezer paper WAXY SIDE down and ironed it to the felt, then traced the stencils and cut cut cut. After we finished cutting we could peel the freezer paper off and then iron those cut out freezer paper shapes down to new felt and do it again. Then you’re never having to trace directly onto the felt and you have an easy template to follow! I had multiple ornament shapes, plus snowmen, gingerbread man and woman, candy canes, bows and several present shapes.

EMBELLISHMENTS

I bought puffy paint, gems, rick rack, google eyes and all sorts of ribbon and trim to embellish the ornaments with. I also had individual sheets of “fun” felt that had patterns, glittery designs, etc… This is where the women got to have tons of fun getting creative. If you look on Pinterest you can get tons of ideas. This was my favorite part of the evening, seeing everyone put their own spin on the ornaments.

NOTES

1. I bought TONS of Tacky Glue and had a bunch of hot glue guns available.
2. I asked the women to bring cookie sheets to lay their ornaments out on since they would likely be taking them home before they were fully dry.
3. We used dark brown rectangles that we had precut as the trunk.
4. Felt sticks to felt pretty well but I didn’t want my kiddos to be frustrated so I found these velcro dots to be an easy and effective thing to add to the back of the ornaments and it made them stick easily.
5. To attached the tree to the wall I hot glued command strips to the back of the tree in several spots and then each year I just new command strips on the wall.
6. I was determined to keep costs low so I hit up Jo-Anns and Hobby Lobby every time I was nearby and used every coupon I could find.

If you love this concept but hate doing crafts you can buy a similar one on Amazon!