Little Bits of Home

Adventures in DIY

DIY Christmas Tree Skirt

Last year on after Christmas sales, we snagged a big variety box of silver ornaments at Target for 50-75% off. I’m really loving the silver on our tree this year! Bad news, though, for our $6 gold, cheapie Christmas tree skirt that we bought our first married Christmas. It looked awful with the silver/red Christmas theme we’ve got going on in our house this year. It’s ok, I never really liked that tree skirt to begin with. Gold is not really my jam.

Anywho… I told Hubby the first world drama of our clashing skirt/ornament problem and asked him what our budget was for a new tree skirt. I got a blank, slow blinking stare. Haha! That usually means it’s time to get creative. I follow Centsational Girl’s blog and she recently posted this gorgeous tree skirt that she made. I love the colors and the scalloped effect! 
I decided to try a felt scalloped skirt and headed to the fabric store to pick up two colors of felt, hoping to find red and silver. Unfortunately, they didn’t have silver, so I ended up going with all red. I’m sad I didn’t get the two toned effect, but still like the results, nonetheless. 🙂 
Let me apologize in advance for the quality of some of these photos. My camera has been full of family photo shoots, so I was using my phone and it was dark.
Here’s my supplies… 2 yards of red felt, old Christmas tree skirt, glue gun and lots of glue sticks, scissors, and a marker. Ignore the beads. They were a failed attempt at embellishments. Pipe cleaners ended up doing the trick!

You’ll notice sewing machine and thread is not on my supply list. Are you surprised? Hot glue worked just fine and allowed me to, once again, avoid sewing anything. Win!

I folded my fabric and cut it into equal pieces and stacked it four layers high. Any more than four layers of felt was hard to cut through. I figured out how big I wanted my scallops and cut out one scallop to use as a stencil. I drew all my scallops out onto the top layer, then cut them out.

After cutting a million scallops out, I started gluing them down to my tree skirt. I used a line of glue across the straight part of the scallops and made my way around the outside edge, slightly overlapping the fabric as I glued. Then, I moved up a few inches and added another row of scallops. Here’s my skirt after two rows of fabric. This is when I realized that one yard was not enough fabric and I’d need to go back to the fabric store for another yard. Whomp whomp. 
To make sure all of the gold skirt was covered up, I cut a circle of felt and glued it down to the middle of the skirt and cut a hole out in the middle. Doing this helped me avoid needing to match up or trim the edges of the scallops to fit around the inside circle. 
I just continued doing rings of scallops until I got up near the opening in the middle and all of the gold was covered. It took me five layers all together. 
At this point, it was looking sort of plain because I had only done one color. I wanted to incorporate some silver into the skirt, but my original idea of a beaded border didn’t work out. The beaded strand didn’t make clean enough creases to follow the scallops. Moving on to Plan B–silver pipe cleaners. All I did was wrap the pipe cleaners in a tight spiral to make circles, tucking the end of the pipe cleaner under to keep it together. I glued them on to the outer layer of scallops, doing every other scallop. 
Done! The best part? It only cost about $6 to update my skirt! BOOM! 

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