DIY Colorful Truffula Trees
When I first said I wanted to make truffula trees for my daughter’s graduation party, I think my husband thought I was taking on a much more ambitious project than I was. That’s how impressive these look. But really, they are fairly simple to make.
Read on to find out how to make your own truffula trees!
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When I was researching DIY truffula trees, I kept coming across the same Martha Stewart tutorial for tissue paper pompoms. I’m sharing that with you as well, since it’s what I ended up using. Did you ever make tissue paper flowers in school? I did (with pipe cleaner stems), and it made me sad to find out that my kids hadn’t done that. This tutorial uses the same technique.
My husband went on a tissue paper hunt for me, and he ended up buying any and all 20”x20” pastel packs he could find. I would have gone even bigger had we been able to find it, but I think they turned out to be a great size. I was looking for 10-12 sheets per color. If you’re open to brighter colors, that opens up a lot more possibilities. I had done a ton of searching on Amazon, and here’s some of what I found there…
The pool noodles came from Dollar Tree. I was hoping to find yellow like the trees in The Lorax, but we went with green. I did see yellow just recently at Target, because of course. I’ve seen DIY truffula trees in all colors, so you can choose whatever color(s) you want!
This is the tutorial I kept coming across for making the tree tops, and for good reason. Once I started making them, my elementary school flower-making came right back to me, and it was super easy.
In most of the photos and tutorials I saw of pool noodle truffula trees, the rings on the tree trunks were made from tape. The rings on the truffula trees in the book have more of a zig-zag shape, so my first thought was to draw them on with Sharpies or paint them, but I wasn’t sold on the idea. Then I had the idea to use black construction paper.
Holding three or four sheets of paper at a time, I made two cuts across the short sides so that I had the paper in three sections. They weren’t perfectly equal, but that didn’t matter. Working with one section at a time, I drew a zig-zag pattern on the top and bottom for my cut lines. Then I cut them out. Sometimes the paper would slip a little and they didn’t match up perfectly, but again, it didn’t matter. In fact, I didn’t want them to all be identical. And cutting three or four at a time saved a lot of time.
Once I had cut out the paper, I started wrapping the “rings” around the pool noodles and used a little piece of tape to secure them. You can make as many rings as you want for your tree trunks. Mine had five or six.
To attach a pompom to each pool noodle, I poked the two strands of wire through the noodle on either side of the inside about 1/2 to 1 inch down from the top. I carefully pulled the wire out of each hole and twisted them together. If you don’t pull carefully, you can pretty easily slice through the top of your pool noodle. If you do, it’s easy enough to just turn it a little and start over.
Once the tops are attached to the trunks, you’re done! All that’s left to do is figure out how to display them. We put a couple of ours in a large vase we have. We attached the rest to our stair railings using a combination of long twist ties and some garland hangers we have (they look kind of like zip ties but they’re reusable).
Check out how the rest of the Oh, The Places You’ll Go graduation party came together HERE!
