Usually, Christmas is a slightly terrifying time for me. It means another year has flown past without me realising where that time went, and I am an uncharacteristically crappy gift-giver (pre giving hand-made gifts) so there was always a huge amount of anxiety and tension around buying two whole families worth of gifts. Yuck. Christmas is actually exciting this year because not only have I lost that anxiety and am making all the gifts (watch this space) but my Grandmother is over from the UK for the first time in a very long time. The opportunity to spend Christmas at the beach was too hard to pass up and as such I didn’t want to buy a real Christmas tree if we weren’t even going to be here to care for / enjoy it! On went the thinking cap and I found this awesome tree that tickled my fancy in a very big way.

(Source)

I definitely went into this project half-cocked… but luckily for me it worked out awesomly – not even a cuss word uttered, yeeha.

Phase one involved drawing the general shape onto the pallet and cutting it out with my handy-dandy jigsaw and a fair amount of brute strength with the handsaw.

Phase two involved adding additional reinforcement to the back of the tree

Phase three saw the outside frames go on (I’ll be honest, there were almost cuss words during this stage) and a light sanding to remove any gnarly bits (a fair few splinters were removed before this point) and a wax/stain from my ever faithful Briwax in Antique Pine.

Phase four included a base – it sat upright fine in the garage, not so much on the carpet. Luckily Hubster is well versed in sorting out these little mishaps of mine so came to the rescue with some wood from the garage and nailed it on the bottom so it’s now sittin’ pretty and of course the decorations.

I love, love, love it. It’s not perfect but it just adds to the charm in my (slightly biased) opinion.