Blaze's New Tinsel Tree

This is the story of an old lamp that found new life as a tinsel tree.

I love the base of this lamp, it was the rest of the lamp that I didn't like, so I got rid of the rest.




Blaze has been bemoaning his lack of holiday decorations, so I decided to make a tinsel tree for his room.

The first level of "branches" are three old metal clothes hangers, straightened out and then cut in half. I then folded each of those pieces of wire in-half. Victorian feather trees often had a bead at the tip of each branch. I placed a gear on the tip of each of my branches, instead. I bent a bit of each wire down and wired the 6 branches to the tree using thin brass wire.




For the two remaining levels, I used floral wire, which was much easier to work with.
Then, starting with the area right under the first level of branches, I wrapped everything with antique, gold tinsel that I found at Goodwill.




It took 2 rolls of tinsel to cover a tree this size. I would have liked to build it up a little taller, but that was all the tinsel of that type that I had.




Blaze went to sleep while I was still making the tree, so I'm putting a few decorations on it tonight, so he'll have a nice surprise when he wakes up in the morning.



The design is based on the Victorian feather trees, the first artificial Christmas trees, but since the tinsel is flame resistant, I felt better about using clip-on candle holders for this tree. I don't leave the candles burning for very long, though, and never unsupervised.