Hi everyone my name is Kelly
and today I'm going to teach you how to make your very own Harry Potter inspired Christmas tree skirt.
Christmas to me is the most magical time of the year.
So when I was trying to come up with how I wanted to decorate my apartment this year
I knew I had to come up with a theme equally as magical.
So immediately I thought about Harry Potter.
I knew right away I had to dive into making my very own first Christmas tree skirt.
I wasn't sure exactly what to do for it until I found the perfect quote from J.K. Rowling.
It is important to remember that we all have magic inside of us.
I thought this quote perfectly brought together the spirit and the magic of Christmas
with the spirit and magic of Harry Potter.
I knew right away that I knew exactly what I was going to do for my Christmas tree skirt.
First, you will need a 70-inch diameter tablecloth.
Next, you'll need fray check.
This is for when you cut your tablecloth to make sure the ends won't fray.
After that, you'll need card stock.
This will be used to create your stencils.
In order to print out your stencils, you will need a laptop or a computer.
To cut out your stencils, you will need an x-acto blade.
You will also need a pencil and scissors.
Once we start painting our stencils, you'll need some fabric paint.
To fill in all of our quotes you will need a variety of different paintbrushes
Next, the fun part.
You'll need a beautiful, adorable trim.
You're gonna need 6 and a half yards of trim in order to make it around your 70-inch table skirt.
Next, you need fabric glue and pins in order to secure the trim to the table skirt as you're glueing it around the table skirt.
For our first step, we're gonna cut a hole in the centre of our tree skirt
and then cut a line down the side of our tree skirt in order to allow it to wrap around the tree at the base.
To do this, fold your tablecloth into quarters
so then you end up with a nice pie shape.
From there, take any sort of glass with a nice circle diameter
and place it in the corner of your tree skirt.
Then, take a pencil, draw that circle around your tree skirt.
Then take your scissors and cut that circle in the corner of our tablecloth.
Even though we just cut a corner
once you open up the whole tablecloth you'll have a nice perfect circle in the centre of your tablecloth.
Then, we will cut a line from the bottom edge of our tree skirt,
through the tree skirt to the centre of the circle.
That will give you that opening where you wrap it around your Christmas tree.
For this next step, we're gonna use fray check along all the edges of our tree skirt that we just cut.
You can start by putting a piece of cardboard or paper
underneath of our tree skirt so when once we're putting that fray check along the edges it won't seep through to your table.
Just put a little bit around the edges where we cut.
You don't need a lot because it's a very thin piece of fabric.
Let this sit to dry for about 15 to 20 minutes and then you'll be able to move onto the next step.
My next step is my favourite step.
We're going to cut out all of our letters that we printed off of our computer onto our card stock paper.
Our tallest letters on my tree skirt at least are about 6 and a half inches tall.
Erm... you can vary depending on how large you want your quote to be on your tree skirt.
But that will just help you get some insight into how big your quote will end up being.
Once you've printed all of your letters out, we can start to cut them out using your x-acto blade.
Once you've cut them out, you'll have this version of a stencil and this version of a stencil.
You can use whichever one you would like in order to place them all out along your tree skirt.
What's really important is to make sure that as you're spacing out all your letters along your tree skirt
that it's perfectly centred.
What you do to get that started is by writing out the entire quote.
I've written our quote into four lines.
This will make sure that our whole front side of the tree skirt is covered in the quote
and there won't be a lot of extra white space.
From there, you want to find the centre of your line to make sure that your quote will be centred on the tree skirt.
Count your letters inwards so you can find the centre of that sentence.
Once you've found the centre of all four of your lines you can get started by placing all
your letters out on your tree skirt.
So we've laid out our first line.
I've got the O and the P in the centre and I've kind of worked my way
out from the centre to the outside of the tree skirt with all of my letters.
That way I know it's going to be centred once I start painting all the letters on.
You can use your pencil and go in and draw all the different letters using
our stencils we created along the tree skirt.
This sometimes takes a little while so be patient.
I put my Harry Potter movies on in the background to keep me occupied.
Next, we can paint the letters!
I'd recommend putting a piece of cardboard or newspaper or something underneath of your tree skirt
to make sure that the paint doesn't go right through your tree skirt onto your nice table.
Alright, to start I'll start at the centre, where the P is is important.
Erm, take any sort brush you're looking for but for bigger, wider spaces you can use a wider paintbrush.
Now this is going to take a little while cos you'll have to layer up just to make sure that all the parts of the
tablecloth and the letters that you're looking for are painted.
When you start getting to smaller nooks and crannies of our letters I recommend going down to a much
smaller paintbrush, because it will help you get to those little corners a lot easier than a big fat brush.
After about an hour or two maybe even longer - this stuff does take a little while
you'll finally reach where you've painted out your entire quote
and honestly, it looks great, just wait to you see it with the fringe on in the next step.
Now we can apply the trim all the way around our tree skirt to add that final pizzazz to our tree skirt.
So to start this make sure you place a piece of paper like we have in other steps underneath of this so the glue
doesn't get all over your table.
Next, take your fabric glue
and start adding a line of glue around that outer edge of your tree skirt.
You can go for about like 3 inches at a time.
Then take your trim and line it up along the edge of that tree skirt, right where your glue was.
Press and hold for about 5 to 10 seconds to really solidify the glue with the trim and the tree skirt.
Once you've held it there for a little bit
take a few pins
and put your pins in the trim and the tree skirt.
This will help it stay in place while it dries.
I add pins in like every 2 inches or so.
It might seem kind of like a lot, but you also don't want your
trimming to come up in any places around the tree skirt.
This fringe stuff gets really crazy.
It can get a little bit in the way sometimes,
so just make sure that's not underneath of your trim where you're gonna glue.
So now we've worked our way around the entire tree skirt
glueing our trim and pinning it together and we've finally reached the end.
So now we can just finish glueing this puppy up.
Laying down that final bit of trim.
Then adding our pin.
At the very beginning and at the very end, I like to put a clothespin there just to really make sure those ends
are really nice and tight.
Now, once you've done your trim all around your tree skirt let that sit for about 2 to 4 hours.
Erm, sometimes you might even want to push that just a little bit more.
I'm going to do overnight just to make sure that it's all dry.
But that way you won't have any issues with glue getting anywhere or making sure that the trim
is fully glued on your tree skirt.
And here it is, the beautiful do it yourself, Harry Potter inspired Christmas tree skirt.
It really all comes together with the big giant quote across front talking about magic,
tied together with the beautiful fringe all the way around the tree skirt.
It looks beautiful.