These West Elm paper trees majorly inspired me, but I did not love the price tag. I figured out that I could create a similar look using thrifted books!
I had several old thrifted books on hand from a previous intended project that I never got around to, so I grabbed a couple and got to work!
The first step was to remove the cover. Once I did that, I drew an outline of half of the shape of the tree. I first started with a simple triangle shape like this:
To create a more similar top to the West Elm trees, I wanted to to sharper corners on the different layers, so I added a couple of horizontal lines like so:
Then, I made new slanted vertical lines, connecting them to create the final tree shape:
On this particular one, I used a box cutter to cute through the layers of the book.
Once I got through all of the layers, I was left with this shape:
To make it 3D, I used hot glue down the spine of the book and held it together until the glue dried.
After a little fluffing, it looked like this:
I set it on top of a wooden napkin ring to add a little height, color, and texture. I love how it turned out! As for the book tree on the right, this is the shape I used for it:
It was a bit wider at the base and had rounded corners. I used scissors to cut this one out.
As always, you can catch video tutorials of this project on my Instagram and you can catch up on all of the Tree Tuesday posts here.
Be sure to come back next week when I share another DIY tree idea to fill up my shelf!
