DIY Christmas Trees

December 11, 2012, 8:24 am
Filed under: Uncategorized

DIY Christmas Trees:

A while ago Erik posted a link to an Instructable on how to make cute chairs out of scrapwood. William, author of that project, just let us know that he’s done a holiday Intructable on how to make a cute and quick modernist “flat pack” Christmas tree.
This sent me into an internet rabbit hole, wherein I procrastinated for a long while reading about homemade Christmas-tree-like-structures. Two favorites:
1) The Mountain Dew Christmas tree. On one hand, I’m appalled to think that somebody drank that much soda. On the other hand, the structure is really nice and it looks pretty all lit up:

2) And the hardback book tree, made out of a cut-up book. The cool thing about this one is that the cover stays intact, so you can close it up and store it on your book shelf until next season:

Now, I know some people get cranky about book desecration, but even as a book lover and author, I don’t feel this has to be a bad thing. If you’ve ever perused the book section of a Goodwill, you know that there are books out there which could do with re-purposing.
My picks for the chopping block are celebrity bios and inexplicable runaway best-sellers like the Da Vinci Code and 50 Shades of Grey. These publishing phenomena are like biblio oil slicks, cluttering up shelves and choking out endangered books. Erik’s suggestion is Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust – And How You Can Profit from It: How to Build Wealth in Today’s Expanding Real Estate Market …published in 2006. Written by David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors. (!) I’d say that maybe that needs to go into a time capsule to explain to future archeologists why our civilization collapsed.