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| | I have a work night this Friday and boy am I behind. I have plenty of people signed up to help but I have to gather all the supplies for them to work with. Can someone suggest a good way to make palm trees? Also, I really need to see some pictures to see other ideas for decorating. Can someone please post pics of what they did 2 years ago? I love the wall in Kathy's post! Ours is going to be outside but I'm going to try to replicate it. Thanks in advance!
Sarah in Ohio |
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| | Sarah -- I'm posting directions for how we made our palm trees. They were very easy. If you'll send me your email address, I'll send you a picture of them. - Cut a piece of plywood 18" square.
- Cut a piece of 2"x2" wood 12" long.
- Secure the 2x2 to the middle of the plywood square with L brackets and screws.
- Cut a piece of burlap (from Wal Mart) into a 24" square. Cut a 3"-4" 'X' in the center of the burlap.
- Put the 'X' over the 2x2 and use the burlap to cover the plywood base.
- Cut a piece of cardboard carpet tubing 6' long. The diameter of the tube really doesn't matter.
- Cut the bottoms off of brown paper lunch bags. Crumple the bags several times until they get good and wrinkly.
- Feed the paper bag "scrunchees" over the cardboard tube until the tube is covered.
- Cut 8 big palm leaves from green paper. We used bulletin board paper and shaped the leaves like this: (). Then we cut little trianagle-shaped notches along the sides.
- Use some cardboard scraps to cut some 1/2" strips of cardboard that are almost as long as your palm leaves. Glue these down the center of of the back of each of the leaves.
- Punch a hole at the top of each of your leaves and put a hole reinforcement sticker on the under side.
- Buy a cheap, green umbrella from somewhere like Dollar Tree.
- Open the umbrella and unscrew the little metal cap on the top.
- Place the punched hole in your palm leaves over the exposed top of the umbrella and then screw the cap back on.
- Stick the handle of the umbrella down in the cardboard tube and you have a palm tree!
Why glue the strip of cardboard to the under side of the leaves? It helps give the leaves shape. You can curve that cardboard to make the leaves hang down over the edges of the umbrella. If your paper is heavy, the leaves will just want to stick straight out. If your paper is too thin, they'll want to curl up. The cardboard strip allow you to shape them how you want them. A piece of wire would work, too . . . but you'd run the risk of poking a hole in your leaf. What happens if the edges of your palm leaves want to curl? Iron them! Use a high setting with no steam and iron away. We've used our palm trees since Lava Lava Island and we are still using the same paper leaves. They keep getting crumpled, and we just keep ironing! In fact, we're still using the same brown paper bags, too!! 
 Amy in Ohio |
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| | Wow someone that didn't do LLI. If you can't get carpet tube, some use PVC. What we did is just take some silk ficus trees and add the palm leaves from paper and some wire you use to hand suspended ceilings. ;-) Memories!!!!!
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| | Thank you soooo much everyone! Looks like I need to start visiting some carpet stores tomorrow. Joyce, we did LLI but I was only co-director then and the director bought the blowup palm trees and then borrowed a couple from another church. I wasn't involved in creating any that year. I appreciate everyone's help. I'll let you know how Friday goes.
Sarah in Ohio |
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| Carpet tubes, paper lunch bags, paper leaves and old beat up umbrellas (or $1 at Dollar Tree). Can't get cheaper or easier than that! We made quite a few that way for LLI!
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Last Login: 7/11/2007 9:14:09 AM
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| | The easiest way to make palm trees are to get carpet rolls, then get brown lunch sacks and cut the bottoms off of them and then cut several v cuts on the sacks, slide them down the carpet roll, i take brown paint and streak over the "bark" then take moss and hot clue around sacks in several spots, put a ball of foam in top of tree, then i ordered palm leaves to put in the top. Looks great! |
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| 3" PVC pipe is more expensive than you think, but you might have some guys who have some lengths of it laying around (I would not recommend buying pipe just to make palm trees--far too expensive).
FYI, we made about 10-12 trees, and used PVC for only 2 of them (carpet tubes for the rest). I found the PVC too heavy to be practical, and we have to put more effort into making sturdy stands to deal with the weight. However, we put a float in this year's 4th of July parade and used the more sturdy pvc pipe on the float (we drilled the pipe directly to the floor of the trailer).
Also, the first year we made the palm leaves out of green paper rolls. They looked great, but those rolls of paper are not cheap, and the paper leaves didn't survive the week. This year we used fabric (though to do this we had to keep the umbrella in tack, so we didn't take off the umbrella's fabric--this gave the green fabric something more stable to rest on).
As it stands now, we have 10 palm trees which can easily go into storage. The carpet tubes stack like cordwood (we just left the paper bags on them). We remove the fabric, put each one in a plastic ziplock, and fold the umbrellas. Presto! Everything packs away neat and clean for next year!
Also, do rule out borrowing green fake trees from other churches. Most churches have some. |
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