The Christmas Tree Tutorial

Finally I am posting!

I have been gone all day, driving my son to an appointment, taking care of numerous errands that we had to do, taking him home and now we have very strange and spooky weather with actual tornado warnings and tornado sightings all around us! The storm is to hit us in an hour or so. No basement in the apartment building where I live - frightening! I didn't think to check for a basement when I rented this apartment, as I did not know that the older apartment buildings could be "grandfathered" in with many things lacking in the construction! Like a basement!

The Christmas Tree Magic Box was created from two patterns. The tutorial and pattern for the box can be found on my friend Patti's blog at http://www.creationsbypatti.blogspot.com/ where on her Friday, May 29, 2009 post is a Cake In A Box Tutorial. It is a wonderful tutorial and easy to follow! This is the basic pattern and instructions I use for all my Magic Boxes - making adjustments in the height of the box if it is needed to accomodate the 'surprise' inside. The box itself is not difficult to make, it is the inside 'surprise' that takes more effort! :<}

The Christmas tree was made from the 'Christmas Tree Gift Box & Display Box' pattern I purchased from a great company called Card Carousela - a wonderful company that has many fantastic patterns! They are at http://www.cardcarousel.co.uk/store/ The cost of this pattern is US $9.06 plus shipping. The pattern also includes a display box template but I intended to put the tree in a Magic Box so I used only the tree template, the star template, the box template and the present template.

I cannot give you the actual pattern but I can show you a tutorial on how I assembled it. This is a wonderful pattern and I recommend it as one that you would use the templates over and over - especially with the Christmas seaon just around the corner. Yes, it is! :<} All of their patterns are very well presented with excellent instructions to follow - making even the more complicated of their patterns not horribly difficult to assemble. The Dove Cote and the Carousel, which are the 'surprises' in other Magic Boxes I have posted here, are also Card Carousel patterns.

I am very distracted, I must say, as there are so many tornado warnings and funnel sightings and storms with golf ball size hail! All moving our way! So I may have to stop and shut down the computer at any time while posting this tutorial. It is very still outside and dark and weird. But on to the patterns!

Thia is the pattern packet that you will receive if you were to purchase this pattern.

The tree consists of 10 individual sections. I traced the tree section template 10 times on SU Garden Green CS and cut them out. Each individual section needed to be marked on the back so as not to mistakenly glue the front of a section to the back of another section- which would result in an uneven tree. Then each tree section was scored down the middle and folded in half until I had 10 cut and folded tree sections.

After all 10 sections were cut out and folded in half, I glued the back of one individual section to the back of another individual section until I had 5 sections glued together - resulting in half a tree.

Then I traced and cut the star template from SU Summer Sun CS.

The 5 glued together tree sections were then folded open flat and the cut out star was glued to the top of these flattened tree sections. Then I continued adding the remaining 5 individual tree sections one at a time - gluing back to back - until I reached the 10th and final section and that was glued to the first tree section to make a complete tree.

After the tree was assembled and I had made certain that the combined tree trunks were cut straight across at the bottom, it was time to start to assemble the tree base. The base of the tree is also the lid of the box that the tree stands on. In tomorrow's posting I will continue the tutorial.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial so far! I need to close down my computer now so I will be back in the morning! Thank you for stopping by to visit my blog! Wishing you well.

Barbara Diane