Earlier this year I tried to track down a vintage silver tinsel Christmas tree, but had no luck for various reasons. New ones don't have the right look. I wanted something fragile looking, threadbare and completely different to trees you can buy in the shops nowadays. I decided I would make one. Since February my little brain has been buzzing with thoughts of how to go about making a tree, I came up with a few different ways, but in the end went with the idea I thought would be simple to do.
Even though I have absolutely no intention of decorating for Christmas until at least the second week of December this year, I wanted to get on with this project. Today I completed my little tree. I was going to show photos in a 'how to' manner, but in all honesty this is a labour of love, and I can't imagine for a moment that anyone else would want to make their own tree. However, I will tell you how I went about it. I bought the cheapest tinsel I could find, as it had the right look - flimsy and old. I needed coathangers, a garden cane, glitter, glue, and a hot glue gun.
Starting with the coathangers, I cut them down to make branches. The simplest way of doing is was to cut either side of the curve to the length required. 
I used the hot glue gun to stick them to the garden cane. Which is a task in itself, but perseverance paid off. Luckily, as I wanted the tree to look quite gappy, I didn't have to glue too many branches on. After that, I used normal glue to stick glitter down the garden cane.
I should not have done this part outside as it was very blustery, and I wasn't able to save and reuse much of the glitter!I cut the tinsel, and glued it to the branches. Easier said than done, this was the most irritating and fiddly part of the whole thing.
After covering all the branches, and adding extra glitter to the trunk of the tree, it was done. I turned it upside down and added more hot glue where the branches are attached to the trunk, just for added strength. This photo shows the underside of the branches.
I glued the tree into an ice bucket but will add cement to it too, for extra weight and security. The cement can easily be covered over with something to make it pretty. So there we have it. A 'vintage' tree. I put it on the little table in the dining room so I could try it out with lights. That's where it will be this Christmas. There is a silver~grey bow tied on the top, and there will be a few lightweight baubles on it as well as the lights, but that's all. It's quite delicate and couldn't have lots of heavy decorations on it, but as I want it to look simple and pretty that's fine by me.
Now I can put it in the garage out of the way until it's needed.
I'm really glad that I did this, it has exactly the look I wanted. Though I must be totally honest and say that it wasn't as easy as I'd convinced myself it would be.Overall costs weren't bad either. Vintage ones I found online were around the £30 mark, with shipping almost the same as the only ones I could find were in the USA.
I had to buy the glue gun - I've been meaning to do so for a while - but I already had the ice bucket, glitter, normal glue and garden cane. So even with buying a glue gun, the total cost of making this tree was about £10. Quite a saving. Even with the difficulty making it, I think it was well worth it.