Lighting Up Tiny Trees!

First, there were tiny houses, now we'd like to introduce you to tiny trees.

These cute little guys come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Both real and fake, they are perfect for small apartments and make lovely table accents.

We love them because they are super-easy to decorate, look great around the house and make fantastic gifts.

Don't you know someone who'd love a little easy-to-manage Holiday decoration?

(I'll be giving one to my Great Aunt Laverne!)

They also make great hostess gifts.

We like to put them at the end of the sofa.

Materials

a tiny tree (more notes below)
lights - we used incandescent craft lights and battery fairy lights for this project
small ornaments
small tree skirt or napkin

Here's a little forest of tiny trees. These were all found at our local hobby stores. Keep an eye out for Christmas sales and coupons before purchasing!

This entire project will work just as well for small real Norfolk pines and small rosemary trees. (Like the rosemary tree we used as part of brightening up an entryway.)

Some trees are tinier than others. Traditional and made of tinsel. Average prices $8-$16.

You might already have the lights you'll need for this project in your craft stash. For the denser tiny trees, these craft lights are a good choice because you can tuck the wiring into the branches. This set was a great match for our small, dense, traditional tree.

We chose multi because it's so Christmas-ey but white or any other color is a great choice. This string has 35 lights spaced 3 inches apart. There are 36 inches of wire between the plug and first light so you might not need to use an extension cord.

Here is the string of the fairy lights we used in our other three trees. This is a set of lights we keep in our purses and map pockets for battery light emergencies.

This is a shot of the yellow string that we used on the green tinsel tree. The other trees have white lights. Either yellow or white work great.

As it turns out, the hobby stores and big box stores carry mini-ornaments and tree skirts that are meant to be used with trees of smaller stature. We chose traditional gold with black and a package of pastel ornaments. For our little green tree, we used super small traditionally colored balls.

See the little tiny plastic ornaments on the dark green tree? So cute!!

We wrapped each tree with lights then added ornaments. Have fun choosing color combinations. This project is perfect for rainy days when kids are on Winter Break.

The tinsel tree with yellow battery lights. This little guy is such a show-stopper, we stopped at the lights.

(We've actually done this with our real Christmas tree but that's another day's story.)