Repurposed Road Map Christmas Trees
Have you ever noticed that old road maps are often printed in festive colors? That is the roads are printed in red, the rural areas in green and the background in white. This makes them great for Christmas crafting, in the past I've made fabulous colorful rosettes out of old maps to decorate my home for the holiday season (see here). This time I have decided to make some tabletop Christmas trees for my mantle with the maps.
If you don't have any old road maps, you can normally pick them up very cheaply from charity/thrift shops. Or just ask some elderly relatives, they often have stashes of out of date road maps.
Open up the road map and then using a rotary cutter and mat cut up the map.
If you follow the fold lines of the map you should end up with a stack of identical sized sheets of map.
Next, you want to glue a spine onto the stack of maps to create a map book.
Turn the map book over and fold down the first page from the top right corner to the center spine.
Next, fold again along the diagonal to the center spine. You will notice that a bit sticks out from the bottom of the book. Just fold this under.
Carry on folding every page in the map book the same way.
Then glue the 2 ends together.
Next, make a star topper with gold paper and a toothpick. Simply stick the topper into the top of the folded tree.
Finish off the map Christmas trees by sticking them to a cotton reel wrapped in velvet ribbon. For more photos visit the blog link at the end.
I also made some simple Map Luminary bags (see here) with the road maps for a gorgeous New Years Party decoration.
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Dale Zusi on Dec 11, 2020
As a child, I made those out of old Readers Digest magazines. Back then no one liked all the pretty colors from the pictures and ads so we spray painted them green and threw glitter on them. This is a nice update
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Claire at Pillarboxblue on Dec 11, 2020
Thank you.
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