A week and a half ago, I created a slotted together Christmas Tree decoration as a test. My older daughter saw it and asked if she could decorate it, but I couldn’t let her as I needed it for work. Given how easy it was to create, I went ahead and made her several more to color.
These were laser cut out of not-quite 1/8″ lite plywood. The Christmas Trees are 6″ tall, and the Snowflakes are 4″ tall. The flat ones were jammed into the open spaces on the sheet of wood so I didn’t waste as much material.
The items were downloaded from Shutterstock as they had several vector graphics containing multiple Christmas Trees, so I’d only need to buy one image. Same with the snowflakes. I looked for ones with simple, symmetrical designs.
If you want to make these, here are the steps (it’s really simple):
- Size the tree to whatever you want in Illustrator, Inkscape, whatever…
- Measure the thickness of your material.
- Make a rectangle that is half the height of your tree, and where the width is the thickness of your material (in my case, 3″ x .11″).
- Center align the tree and rectangle.
- Duplicate the pair of items.
- On one, ‘bottom align’ the tree and rectangle. On the other, ‘top align’ the items.
- Use the pathfinder options to remove the rectangle from the tree, and you’re done.
Go past the jump for more photos:
