I made the flat-pack Christmas tree, so kindly offered to all of us on the forum by @chris1. I made mine out of Proofgrade med.clear acrylic, though it can certainly be made out of any other materials. After it had all been cut out, I found out that I didn’t have anything to use for the ‘trunk’, so assembly had to wait until I found some clear drinking straws of just the right diameter. A straw works just fine…and certainly makes the whole tree featherlight, but really it would be much better to have something of more substance, like a metal tube, but to paraphrase Chris, you just have to use what’s available.
In as much as I actually enjoy it, weeding took about 30 min. and there are several very tiny pieces that have to be done, as well as the larger ones. It is designed for someone to be able to assemble and disassemble it, and essentially be able to send it in the mail. I found however, that I needed to glue the base, so there went that notion. It was just too wobbly. I also wrapped at least two layers of scotch tape around the bottom of the straw to give it a tighter fit into the piece of acrylic designed to hold it. It was fun to assemble, but honestly, I would not care to keep doing that every year. I would just put it into a little box and let it be.
I redesigned the star on top. It’s ‘stem’, the part that slides down into the straw, was too narrow and too short…again, the wobbliness, so I made the stem wider and longer….and made the star itself larger and with more points.
It’s pretty tiny…about 6.5” tall……but in acrylic, it’s pretty sparkly looking, too! I’m thinking it would look even fuller and prettier if I used twice the amount of branches and only one spacer in between each one rather than two. Against the right backdrop, it would be lovely on it’s own…but a LED light bulb went on over my head and I thought about the under water light ‘pucks’ that I had bought this summer.
About 2.75” across, it seemed they might make a good light base for the tree. I had never used them in the pool as I’d thought I might, so this would be a good alternative.
They worked perfectly, but I thought it should be housed in some kind of base to keep the light going just up to the tree.
So, I made this; it’s a bottomless box with a frosted acrylic insert on the top that hides the uglier battery part of the light, diffuses the light a bit on the top edges, but allows full lights under the tree. The reason I made the box bottomless is because the top and the bottom of the lights screw/unscrew apart for the batteries and I just wanted easy access. If I did this again, I might come up with a better design, but this is my methodology for getting to that place. Now, woe be unto whomever tries picking the tree up by the box part. Ha!
Lastly, I decided to engrave some Christmas imagery on the box sides….which worked very well until I glued two of them upside down! Good thing this one was only for me, as it would have been a big pain if it were for someone else. I also couldn’t resist doing my embossing thing on them. Only one turned out to be my saving angel……she was right side up. And the fourth image? turned out so badly that I won’t even show a photo of it here.
All in all…….it turned out beautifully and was another chapter in my learning book.
