Sept from Amy - Tree of Life

 

Amy said she used an idea off my August envelope. I like the how she expanded the idea and it would be fun to do 5 or 10 variations on this theme. Since I have to get both my Nov and Dec mailing done and in the mail - maybe this will be one of the ideas.

I posted this sneak peek previously - so, I'll just edit this post and add the inspiration tree.

A tree is not a nicho. But I've always wanted to make a tree of life - so I jumped on the opportunity.

I printed out an image of the inspiration tree to the size that we wanted it to be and had my sister-in-law follow the outline. We were both so tired of adhesives that didn't stick - so I told her to just staple the railroad board strips. 

The inspiration tree of life was probably made out of clay and was colorfully painted. Of course, mine was going to be monochromatic because I thought each side of the ofrenda needed at least one nicho that was neutral compared to the over-the-top colors of all the others.

The top of the inspiration tree had a sun - and I had run out of time to come up with a sun on my own - so I snagged this sun off an envelope from Rachael. I didn't cut up the envelope, I reprinted it off the photo on the blog and then printed it in black and white. I even left the postmark.

There are going to be more egg cartons down the trunk. And I changed the outer circle on the sun to gold paper. And yes - that is a deli container full of rocks for the base. I'm committed to making things out of the most humble of ingredients. My dream is/was to make another one of these out of cereal boxes to inspire kids to make their own. I'm not sure that's going to happen.

This was step one.

Nancy probably spent an hour stapling all the black strips together. Then I knew that we needed to figure out the trunk support and the base - so I splurged and went to the hardware store and spent $1.29 on a  hunk of PVC pipe. The inspiration tree base looks like an upsidedown flower pot. Since I have no flower posts, I grabbed a deli container out of the recycling. We pondered things to weigh it down. Pennies seemed like a good idea until neither of us had enough. Nancy said, "Rocks. There are a lot of rocks where I live." Bingo. Nancy returned the following day with a container full of rocks. She thought we'd be covering the container - and gave me a *look* when I said - "Nope - it will be more inspirational if we let it be scrappy."

It was droopy so we added more staples.