Repurposed Road Map Christmas Trees

4 Materials
$1
30 Minutes
Easy

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 Or just ask some elderly relatives, they often have stashes of out of date road maps.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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Claire at Pillarboxblue
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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