Explaining how to do this craft is kind of difficult. I’ll do the best I can but mostly it’s all about being willing to just “go at it” and work with it until you like the finished look.
Six coils of wire. I used the largest gauge I could get my hands on. I want to say that it’s 28 gauge.
Cut it all into 18 inches lengths. (My wire cutters are Knipex brand. Expensive, but I do a lot of floral design with “permanent botanicals” and they cut through the wire like nothing else.)
Gather all of the lengths of wire into one hand
and start twisting in the middle. Twist tight. It might help to have gloves that have some kind of grip to them. You need strong hands for this gauge of wire.
Start pulling sections out and twisting them away from the trunk…at the top for limbs and the bottom for roots. You need the roots long enough to be able to stand the tree up and the limbs longer than the roots so that it looks like a tree.
Keep twisting until you get roots and branches looking the way you like.
With a pair of round nose pliers bend the branches this way and that to resemble the branches as they go farther out on the tree. Each limb getting smaller and smaller until you have one length of wire as the tip branches. The branches are where you’ll hang your jewelry.
I put this one in a glass bowl with lustre gems around the base. The bowl also allows more room to place some of your jewelry.
Of course you can skip the bowl if it isn’t to your liking. I’ve seen trees with the roots wrapped around a rock or you can just sit it “as is”. I’d probably put something (table runner, napkin, fabric of some kind) underneath the roots to keep it from scratching the furniture.
And just in case you’d like to have help making your tree… I am teaching this class on December 12th from 10am-Noon in Cuyahoga Falls, OH. The cost is $25 and it includes all of the supplies to make one tree. A useful Christmas gift if you ask me. 😉
Thanks for the instructions – I made one following your instructions using green plastic-covered wire (it’s what I had on hand; from a hardware store) and adding a fabric leaf at the end of each branch to accommodate stud earrings.
28 g??? That’s a very thin wire– yours looks more like 18g or larger. (the larger the number, the thinner the wire.).