Family Tree

  I've seen quite a few wall family trees online and it inspired me to make one of my own. We don't have a lot of free wall space so i decided to put it up in the stair well. I'm not much of a painter so looked around for a tree decal, didn't see anything quite what i was looking for so i checked out some mactac hoping to find something in brown. I came across a wood grain Mactac at a local grocery store that i thought would either work or look really tacky. Fortunately for me it ended up looking great.

  I started out with the main trunk of the tree getting it cut out long enough and placing it on the wall where i wanted the tree to start out. From there i cut out long narrower strips for the branches. I found "cutting" with the scissors wasn't necessary, if you just hold the scissors open you can pull it straight through the mactac without getting any jagged scissor lines and you can just direct it to widen or narrow your strips as you go quite easily. I worked from the lower half of the tree up to put the branches on and get them spaced out to my liking. From there I added offshoots to the branches slowly filling it out along the way, i quickly realized i needed to make the tree a lot taller than i had originally cut it out too and extended the main trunk with another piece of mactac on top of what was already there for it to reach the ceilng.

  For the photos i wanted to use all old family black and white photos all in silver frames. I did a lot of photo copying and enlarging of photos at staples ( i did a lot of them years ago well before this project and before i had the computer technology to do it at home) All the ones from my husbands family we just printed them off on our home printer. For the frames i got a lot on sale at Winners (TJ Maxx for those of you in the US) that was before there were dollar stores, and i scrounged a lot that i had unused around the house. All the new additions are from dollar stores, cheap when you need to buy lots of them. About half of the frames were silver already the other half i spray painted silver to  match. Not all the frames had hooks on the back for hanging so i just wrapped some framing wire around the picture stand to create one.

  I put a few frames up as i went along to gauge how many branches i would need and what looked good where.

  From there i added lots of off shoots to my branches to make it look nice and full. Then i spaced out all the photos to fill out the branches. The tree isn't completely full there's still room to add more photos as we acquire them.

  Lastly i wanted to add leaves to the tree to finish it off and give it a bit of colour. I couldn't find any green mactac to make my own leaves. Instead i found wall vinyl decals at Dollarama that had green stems with leaves on them.

  I just cut the leaves off and applied them to the end of all the branches, i cut a few smaller leaves out of the green stems as well.