wine bottle palm trees

I just finished doing a couple of wine bottle palm trees for Princess P's birthday party in a couple of weeks and thought I'd share them here! They turned out really great so if anyone's considering, say, a monkey party (or a jungle party, or safari party, beach party, whatever) these might be something you want to try!

Materials:
1 wine bottle, rinsed clean with no cap or cork
scotch tape
3-4 lunch size brown paper bags
1/2 sheet of green poster board (I guess you could use a lighter paper but I don't think the leaves would stand up so nicely)
hot glue gun - you could try white glue but you'd be there forever waiting for it to dry

Here is what we're going for! They are really sturdy too, which is especially nice for a kids' party!



Steps to follow:
1. Cut out six leaves from the green poster board. Make sure they are gently arched and cut triangles from the bottom part. Don't worry about making them identical - it's better to have a variety of lengths & degrees of arch in them. Keep one end of the leaves a bit wider than the other. While you're at it trim the bottoms from the paper bags so they are tubes instead of bags.

2. Slide the paper bags over the wine bottle and crumple as they reach the bottom, like this:



3. When your bottle is covered with bags, take a strip of scotch tape and wrap it around the paper at the mouth of the bottle so it's tight. Don't cover the mouth of the bottle.



4. Take two of your palm leaves and cut a 1/2" strip in one end but don't cut it right off - just make it a slit that covers about 3/4 of the leaf. Layer the leaves over each other so the strips line up, and glue them together, like this:



5. Insert the glued strips into the mouth of the bottle. If it's a little tight, you can either fold the strips a bit to make them fit, or do what I did and just jam 'em in there. Be careful not to rip the leaves off at the top of the strips.



6. Now fold a tab into the wider ends of the remaining leaves. Folding on an angle will affect which way the leaf hangs from your tree - if you want them perfectly symmetrical fold them all straight, if you want them to be at different heights, fold in different places and on different angles.



7. Put hot glue on the folded tabs and glue them to the bottle. Space them evenly around the mouth of the bottle.



8. Now your topper leaves: cut out two symmetrical leaves from the green poster board.



9. Fold them in half and trim triangles (you want triangles on both sides of the leaves when they are unfolded.)




10. Roll these leaves around whatever you have handy (a rolling pin, a water bottle, a glass... I had a paper towel roll) to get a nice gentle arch to them.



11. Dab hot glue on one end and stick into the mouth of the bottle. You'll have two leaves sticking a bit higher up than the other ones - you can curl them a bit more if you need to have them hang a bit lower. You can also recrumple the paper bags to make sure you like the how bumpy the trunk looks. I'm pretty happy with how these turned out! Quick & not too expensive, either! (Assuming of course you have as many wine bottles lying around the house as I do, lol!)