Let's pretend you have an old tree skirt that you don't love, about a yard of burlap and red fabric, and 25 sticks of hot glue gun glue that you don't know what to do with. Oh, and a naked Christmas tree. And also two hours. And a handful of cookies.
If I just described you, go buy yourself a lottery tickey (you'll only need one) because today is your lucky day. (Actually, you better make it two.) (Okay, fine, maybe three. But three really should cover you for some big winnings.) Because those are the only ingredients you need to make a no-sew tree skirt just like this one:
(I supPOSE the cookies might be optional. But barely.)
Let's start at the beginning of this very short and, let's be honest, probably boring tale.
Recently, someone handed-me-down (handed-down-me?) this tree skirt:
It wasn't quite to my taste, but I didn't turn it down because...well, I just didn't. I thought I could make it work somehow. And that "somehow" became today. With chunky stripes of burlap.
(We scour the forest and cut down our own tree every year, which is a great tradition. However, these trees are much sparser than artificial ones, and a tree skirt definitely shows up.)
I started by cutting lots of strips (probably used about a yard of each fabric) about 4" wide. You probably all know this, but just in case you don't: to cut burlap straight, make a snip on the edge and then pull a single strand all the way through the full length of the burlap. That opens up a straight line wide enough to cut.
K, so now we have lots of red and burlap strips. Perfect. I flipped my tree skirt over and started hot gluing the burlap to the quilted side. You'll figure out a method that works for you, but basically what I ended up doing was laying down a line of hot glue about 6-8" long on the existing skirt, gluing the strip to it (while leaving a little extra fabric/burlap at the top as a "pleat"), then gluing down the pleat.
I started using a weight (rather than my fingers) to hold down the freshly glued pleats while I moved on to the next 8", and that worked well.
Around and around. My circles had gotten a little off by the time I got to the top/inside of the tree skirt. There was an awkward space there -- too much to be covered by one ruffle, but not enough for two ruffles all the way around. So I glued down some red fabric to hide the white skirt and did my last red ruffle on top of that.
Then I decided that I actually had a little more space than I thought but just a small strip of burlap left, so I added a "half" ruffle. (An exact science, this ain't.) I did make sure that the top ruffle was centered to the front of the tree skirt. *gold star*
Here she is:
And look what cuteness I spied: my sweet 6-year-old daughter already leaving Christmas gifts for everyone under the tree.
Welp, there you have it.* I'd highly recommend this project. It's inexpensive (free!), and the end result is delightful.
Happy burlap-ing.
*Addendum: I just saw a verrrry similar skirt like this on Pinterest. Hooray for great minds thinking alike!
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