Pretty Sad Paper Trees

Em here, after a (short) weekend away for a baptism and a wedding in my home town, and then a trip cut short cause The Mr. Chips caught what I had two weeks ago, go figure right, Marquette caught it! And on her birthday no less, so send her happy thoughts, and get well soon wishes, and for now you are stuck with me! Muahahahaha ;) Anyways back to business, today's Pinstrosity is from Holly. Check it out:

The Original

http://pikadillycharm.blogspot.com/2011/11/paper-bag-fall-tree.html

This cute little project is fun for the little ones, and seems simple enough, a major bonus is that you probably have all the supplies you need for this one, but one of our readers had problems with it, lets see her results.

The Pinstrosity



As you can see Holly's version didn't quite go as planned, sometimes (as we have said before) we get a super awesome reader who tells the story best themselves, this is one of those times, here is what Holly had to say:

"I help run a day camp for kids at my church and everyday we show a movie and kind of use that as our theme for the day. We showed Mirror Mirror so we went on the Snow White, fight for what you believe in, apple theme. I know, kind of stretching it thin with connecting that to paper bag tree's, but they're 9-year-olds so they don't care. So anyway, we found this paper bag tree on Pinterest and were like oh that'll be easy. We'll just buy some bags, cut little green pieces for leaves, and use a hole punch on red paper for apples. Simple right? No need to try it the day before or anything. About an hour before craft time, we decided to try it out. We really tried it just did not work.

It wasn't a complete failure. It just didn't look decent enough for us to send home with the kids to the parents. "Look what I made Mom! A crumpled up paper bag!"

Here's what I think went wrong: First, we cut the strips in the bottom of the bag way to big. They should've been much skinnier. Second, we cut the leaves in chunks to big as well. They wouldn't stay glued to the tree, hence why they aren't in the picture. Third, the actual bags we used should have been the larger lunch bags. Ours were just to short for this.

What I decided to do in the end was to cut four big strips in the bottom of the bag. I still twisted it to form the trunk, and then I twisted the larger branches to hold the green part that made it look like a happier apple tree."

Here is the "Happy Apple Tree"

Much better eh? So the moral of this story is that you need to use the right size bag, and cut the pieces the right size. As with most project we feature on the blog, it is all about the supplies and following the directions to a "T". A cute craft to do with your kids, has anyone else tried this and have any tried and true advice for this? Let us know! Have a happy Wednesday everyone!



                                                                                                                                  -Emilee