Magazine Christmas Tree Tutorial (or an activity to keep your kids quiet)

Wow. It’s amazing how just a little bit of sunshine and manual labor can make you so much happier. Here’s my backyard this morning! We did some shoveling too that has already made my arm sore.

So, in my true spirit of this blog, I’m going to share a very simple craft that you can do with your kids. Just kidding, I rarely share crafts. And, if I’m sharing it, you know two things….It’s easy, It’s cheap, and it is either super fast, or will keep the kids entertained for super long. OK, that’s three. Because that’s the only way I do crafts.

I saw this idea floating around about making Christmas trees out of magazines. WHAT? It sounded a little bit like Origami at first, which scared me a little bit. Not gonna lie. (Who has time or patience to make paper birds?) But, the truth was, it was more like folding a paper airplane. Much more my style.

I liked this idea I found on the inter webs (here’s the link) because I already had old magazines laying around (HELLO! Can you say the Ensign and Friends galore?) OK. Only Mormons will get that one. But, let’s just say we have lots of old magazines laying around. So, it cost me zero money for this project, and as an added bonus, cost me about zero patience. Hooray!!

First: Tear off front and back cover of magazine and break binding if it’s a really big magazine (like Vogue which would be much more cool for this tutorial)

Second: Fold first page like so:

Third: Grab the far side of that same page and pull it over again like this. Make sure to make good creases!

 

Fourth: Now that it looks like a tie, fold the bottom part of the “tie” up to make it even with the bottom of the magazine pages…like this:

Now, do this OVER and over and over again until you fold every page the same way.  My four year old finally got it down in about 10 pages of me helping him, and the 7 year old totally got it after like 2. When you fold every page like the above instructions, you get this:

The magazine Christmas Tree can stand up!!

And, I had some leftover spray paint from my Art Wall Project, so we decided to spray paint ours. Makes them fun, huh?

We were going to glue on decorations, but it was dinner time. Maybe another day.

I will say that the Ensign was a little on the small side, kind of like OK magazine or US. I don’t read those. Swear. But, if that’s your magazine of choice, then you might get a tree that looks flat on one side. I fixed that problem by just glueing the flat parts of two magazines together to make one really full looking tree. The green one is two magazines glued together. 🙂

Now, don’t say I never taught you anything! Hope your day is happy and bright like mine!

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And, don’t forget to link up this week to my Manic Mondays fun.