Crafty Cone Trees

I am totally in love with those cone-shaped decorative trees that you see everywhere. So I set out to create them myself instead of forking over big bucks to buy them!

Like most craft projects, I started out at Hobby Lobby to buy the styrofoam cones to decorate the way I wanted. Have you ever seen how expensive they are??? Just the foam cone alone ranges from like $7 to $15 (ish) EACH!!!

I really don't get it. Isn't part of the point of crafting things yourself to help you save money? Aside from the fact that it's super fun, of course. Anyway, I wanted a set of 3 cone trees and there was NO WAY I would spend around $30 just for the base of my project.


Enter Pinterest. I know you've all heard of the site, because you are probably just as addicted as I am. Most of the time I don't even get around to pinning stuff because I get so enthralled in what I find there. Anyway, I found the idea on there to actually make the cone base for my trees using cardstock and a plastic cup instead of buying styrofoam. Brilliant! Eureka! Voila! You get the point.

I just happened to have a bunch of Red Solo Cup Blue Solo Cups in the very back of my pantry.  Cost: $0, essentially (The song which is now stuck in your head is just a bonus. You're welcome!)

During the Thanksgiving/Christmas season, several holiday card catalog sources sent us (my office) card samples a couple times a week. Naturally, I pulled all the samples out to keep before I threw the catalogs away.  Cost: $0 (Thank you, Galleria!)

Over a year ago, I was re-painting a room in our house, and bought a roll of "painting" paper. It was supposed to serve as sort of a drop cloth edger thing, I guess. Not really sure. Anyway, I thought it would look cool as the covering for my cones. Cost: $0 (for this project anyway)

I will warn you, doing the cones this way is NOT a project for the faint of heart! I did all three cones on different days, several days apart, because my fingers got so sore. It probably took about 2 hours just to make my paper "ropes" and then another hour or so to glue them on the cone form. Definitely well worth the effort, but not a quickie project by any means.


The cups I used were a little smaller than normal. I think the normal ones would probably be too big for this project.

I started by cutting the paper into approximately 1-1.5 inch strips.

Then painstakingly twisted each strip as tight as I could, without ripping the paper. I didn't want it to look completely uniform.

I used the cardstock to form a cone shape, then fitted it over the cup.

Once I had all the strips twisted into "ropes" I simply started as close as I could to the bottom of the cone and glued the rope around in small segments. This part takes quite a while, because you have to make sure the rope stays twisted and that you glue close enough to the previous row that you don't have any white space in between.

When I got to the top, I went around one more time, then tucked the end of the rope down through the hole in the top and glued it into place. This is what gave it the "finished" look on top. Then I took a brand new rope and went around the very bottom edge of the cone one more time, to give it some more sturdi-ness and to finish that edge as well.

And there you have it - Crafty Cone Trees! (They're really not crooked, it's just the way I took the picture. Photography is not my strong suit.)

At some point, I think I'll make another set that has a few more embellishments on it. For now, these go perfectly in my living room and I love them!

~SMurph~