"Homemade Palm Trees" Topic

Great idea dnd presented well.

An alternative for smaller scale fronds are green garbage bag ties. They already have the wire Just trim off "paper" to expose wire then use your techniques to shape,attach and paint the paper covered ends. The only difference will be smaller trees.

Great tutorial.

Tony

Very inspirational! A neat addition to the terrain "bag-of-tricks."

Great idea! They look fantastic. I am definitely going to try this.

Nice tutorial!

Thanks for the tutorial . As I have tried this , And it works out great .

Hello all,

You can also do this with silk leaves from a craft store and long green wire (also from craft store. Works like a dream and is a good color.

Best,
Richard

I liked your tutorial and particularly the use of the pipe cleaner.

I've tried using silk leaves and florists wire as Lorimer suggests, cutting into the leaves using a fine pointed pair of sharp scissors designed for those who tie fishing flies. I think it's a great method and one worth considering as it saves some painting.

Well, I have not tried the floral leaves… I will have to give it a try.

Glad to see that this has generated some good idea exchanges :)

Nice article!

I have a 50 pack of razor blades, which means you can make a razor "rake" by placing thin pieces of cardboard (whatever thickness you want for your frond strips) in between and then wrap some masking tape around the stack in order to handle. Offset the blades so you can still place the tips along the center of the fond, but allows you to cut at a 30o angle uniformly down the leaf. Takes a little time, but once you start shredding the silk leaves from the craft store in less than 5 seconds per leaf you'll be glad you did it.

You can mount the shredded leaf on wire as in the example, but stick them into the tops of cone cones which have been chewed down by squirrels – take a look around the base of large pine trees and I'm sure you'll find some. They make great palm tree stalks.

I mounted mine on fender washers and let the sand/PVA glue mix break up the perfect circle of the base.

Good times.

Gabriel,

Great idea about the stack fo razor blades. I've got some other uses for that as well. Thanks.

David G.

I… was greatly inspired by this one from the U.K.

As far away as that, eh?

Very nice article, though. Very effective results. I'll certainly keep it in mind.

Terrific idea. Going to pass this on to some club guys doing Vietnam.

Great tutorial! Very nice work. I have used this method and it produces a nice result.

Granted, it is rather labor intensive. I now go with the birthday cake palm trees. They are about 30 cents each and you need not but base them and spray a bit of dullcoat to have them ready.

Great tutorial, thank you … I will try it soon :)

Fantastic idea – I swapped feathers for the shrubbery, made some great prehistoric plants. Woth trying the metallic pipe cleaners, they make a nice "prickly" stem.

Great tutorial with very impressive results.

The only detail I would add for greater verisimilitude would be some way of adding the dead black leaves that droop down from under the crown canopy where it grows out of the trunk.