I have made MANY party palm trees over the years. Most of them had the same can with cement nailed to a 12" square wooden base, as I described in my last blog on making PVC decorations.The top picture above is my newest palm tree base. It is a green plastic buckets with a 3" diameter piece of PVC pipe. The three way connector is buried in the cement in the bucket. It took 1/2 bag of quick setting cement to make this, so it is not too heavy to lift, but is very stable.
In the past I have gone to carpet stores to use empty carpet rolls (free) for the trunks. These are very large and work great for big spaces. Lately, for office parties, etc. I have gone to the Container Store or other office supply stores to buy mailing tubes. They make a 3" or slightly larger tube that fits EXACTLY over the pipe. These tubes come in two pieces. I extend the two pieces to the height I want, then tape them with packing tape to hold.
I simply paint the carpet tube brown. For the last party, I bought 3 yards of tan burlap. I cut it in 5" strips the length of the fabric. Then I took each strip and cut 2" cuts all along one side for fringe. Starting at the top of the tube, putting the uncut edge on the bottom, I started winding the strips around the tree. When completed, the fringe fell forward. This gave it a realistic palm effect.
Previous palm tree toppers have been made from Stumps foil leaves, felt home-made leaves, long balloons, etc. But, for the last office party, I ordered large green golf umbrellas. I drew a leaf pattern in pencil on the fabric at each spoke. I had practiced on an old small umbrella. You can NOT cut out the fabric totally from the material between the spokes, because they just FLOPPED. I drew something like the picture above, but I drew a big V between each palm leaf. Believe it or not, it made a GREAT and easy to put up (and store) palm tree topper.
I found this youtube demonstration of how to twist the balloons onto the pole: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojmjUj0jfJs
No comments:
Post a Comment