At 1:00 AM last night I made my best conifer tree yet.
I used the bottle brush method with a few tweaks...
· Layout a 10" piece of masking tape sticky side up
· Cut a 20" piece of wire (I use heavy eclectic fencing wire) bent into an "L" shape
· Cut a 9" piece of hemp rope
· "Taper" the rope by unwinding strands and cutting them out as you go. The part where you will have branches should be pretty thin, maybe just a few "bundles" of fibers thick..
· Feed the wire in and through the "Tapered" rope, It doesn’t have to be perfect, be sure to leave 1" or so of the wire sticking out the bottom of the tree, you’ll need something to clamp to, plus its great for poking into the foam...
· Lay the wire/Rope thingy on the masking tape
· Using various lengths of hemp rope (between 4" and 6") unwind and separate the strands, do not unwind to the individual fibers, just to the smallest "bundle" of fibers..
· Lay the fiber "bundles" artistically, leaving a good amount of the lower trunk with out branches
· Bend the remaining 10" of wire (the other leg of the "L") over the branches, rope and tape. Be sure to form a loop at the top of the tree, and have enough wire from both ends sticking out the bottom of the tree to allow a solid grip with your clamp.
· Cut another 10" piece of masking tape, lay this sticky side down over the whole mess...
· Gently press it all together
· Clamp the ends of the wire to the edge of the table (or vice if your lucky)
· Using a hook chucked into your cordless variable speed drill, slowly twist the tree till it looks like something cool. The winding job will naturally expand most of the rope fibers, so you may want to fluff or retwist as you see fit.
· You should now have something that looks sorta like a tree with a thicker trunk at the bottom. Use liberal amounts of masking tape to increase the taper and really flare the bottom. When I did this, I ended up with a large "bulb" at the bottom of my tree, I used a razor blade to make a clean cut through the tape and rope, at the thickest point of the bulge and removed the bottom of the bulge.
· Add secondary branches by spraying with paint or something sticky and sprinkling bits of grass/moss on to the fiber branches.
· Paint the whole thing with brown paint, then while the paint is still sticky sprinkle fine ground foam over the branches. I also do the trunk, to get some texture from the foam, but then re-spray the trunk with brown again...
Ill post a pic tonight.
Thanks