The assignment for Challenge #16 was vintage or retro. Unfortunately, my entry requires a little bit of explaining. When I was young, we didn't have a lot of money to celebrate the holidays. One of our favorite pastimes was looking at the catalogs (we called them "wish books"). We were told to fold down the pages of the things that we wanted Santa Claus to bring us. Since there were numerous kids, we would all fold the page in a different way.
As I got older, I would started taking magazines and folding the pages so that they made a paper Christmas tree. My favorite magazine to fold was The Reader's Digest. The pages were the right size and the paper was thick enough so that when they were folded, an entire tree would be formed.
After the tree was formed, we would leave it alone or spray paint it. If we had extra decorations hanging around, we would decorate the tree.
So this is a throwback to those days. This is the modern Reader's Digest whose pages aren't nearly as thick as the older versions. For this tree, I had to fold two entire magazines to make up one tree. Once the two halves were formed, I glue them to either side of a wooden dowel.
Rather than make paper decorations like I would do previously, I raided my stash of Christmas decorations that I use for wrapping holiday presents. There are two ball garlands (purple and silver) and a beaded gold garland. I used two miniature gold bows for the tree topper. For the ornaments, I hot glued fabric covered Christmas brads.
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If I had more time, I would have made miniature paper ornaments and garland but I am very happy with the way that this project turned out. Christmas in August--you betcha ya.
1 comment:
We loved looking through the wish books. Sears was always the big one, how times have changed. This is a fantastic retro project.
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