Great Foliage for Flower Gardens
Living in England for over thirty years, I am well acquainted with the chocolate box images of an English cottage garden. Memories of towering delphiniums against a
Feather Trees, especially feather Christmas Trees, are everywhere. Have you seen them? Although I can not claim to have come up with the idea, I do like the look and wanted to try it out to see if I could duplicate it for fall decor. This fall feather tree came together very easily. The base is made from a piece of poster board, making this an inexpensive project to try.
First let me tell you, this is one of the easiest projects I have done all year. This feather tree was made from start to finish in 20 minutes. And the cost? This tree cost less than $1.00 to make because the supplies I bought, (a bag a feathers for $1.99), will make 3 to 4 trees depending on how large a cone base you use.
Table of Contents
ToggleTo keep the cost low, I pulled out a sheet of poster board from my stash and made my own cone base.
Here is how you can duplicate the look for yourself.
Supplies Used:
Bag of Earth Tone Feathers ($1.99 from Hobby Lobby)
1 sheet of poster board
Hot Glue gun
Scissors
Cut a corner off of a piece of poster board on a curve. You can tell that I wasn’t too careful about it. I free-handed it. I suppose if you want to take the time to measure it out you could. I decided to just go for it.
Next, roll the cone. Roll as tight as you want to get the shape cone you are looking for. Tighter will give you a more slender cone and more loose will give you a wider cone. I used my hot glue gun to glue down the edge.
I did need to trim the base of the tree too, but again, you can tell I wasn’t too concerned if it was even, I just wanted the cone to be free-standing.
Next, I dumped out the feathers in a pile so I could pull various colors out at random.
The above picture shows that many of the feathers have a curve. I wanted my feathers to stand out a little from the base, so I applied a small amount of hot glue on the top of the curve and stuck it to the cone working my way from bottom to top.
Keep gluing feathers on until you have completed a circle around the cone. Then move up and add another row of feathers. If I had an area that didn’t cover well, I glued a smaller feather to cover the exposed area.
This whole process went really fast, and the end result . . . pretty cool?
Living in England for over thirty years, I am well acquainted with the chocolate box images of an English cottage garden. Memories of towering delphiniums against a
We have finally thawed out here in Seattle after a week of Tundra-like conditions. Well OK compared to those of you who live in Boston
Gardeners are easily seduced. We understand – sometimes that flirty petal just calls to you but if you don’t give it the right foliage partner
What’s better than ONE luscious leaf? MORE luscious leaves! Yet we can’t always add more plants, so what’s a foliage fancier to do? Try using
What can I tell you – it’s been darn cold. Here in Duvall, WA we had snow followed by sub-freezing temperatures for several weeks. Today
After months of writing, photographing, proofreading, and waiting….we are closer to getting our new book Gardening with FOLIAGE FIRST out into the gardening world! The