Professor Dottie here again from the School of Slap Dash Craftin’ with the easiest Christmas craft tutorial that you can do during your kid’s afternoon nap.

Friends, I bring you the:

Simple and sweet in all its felty goodness!

To make this skirt, you’ll need:

• 1 yard red felt
• scissors (or a rotary cutter would be super great as well if you have it)
• one large pan/bowl
• velcro dots
• 5/8 inch white felt pads for putting behind frames (easily found in the framing dept. of your local hardware store.

Key Prep: figure out the following measurements before you start the project:

• How big of a hole you want for the actual Christmas tree–the circumference (I made a big one because I wanted it to have room to fit around the holder
• How wide you want your skirt to be.

1. Take the folded piece of felt and fold it diagonally into a narrowing triangle three times until your fabric looks like this:

2. Make sure that it is very flat and not wrinkled and that you also have a nice sharp point. I tried to true it with a ruler.

3. Choose the bowl/pan/whatever you have that is round to be your guide to create the scallop edging. Make sure to measure out the length that you wanted from the point to the farthest part of the scallop.

4. Draw a line with a marker using the bowl as your guide to create the scallop. It can get kinda thick, so I cut through what I could and unfolded it and re-drew the scallop with the pan.

5. Now, go to the point of the triangle and use your pan to draw the circle for the Christmas tree. Make sure you have the radius number, which is half of the circumference. You have your skirt. Now comes the fun part. THE DOTS!

6. I looked high and low for dots–at Michael’s and Beverly’s and finally found them at our local hardware store in the framing department. Huzzah!  Self stick to boot, so you don’t have to deal with glue. Double huzzah!

7.  Make your dot pattern–I free-handed it with putting a dot in the middle and at the ends and in between.

8. Now you are almost done, my friend!  You need to make a cut in the skirt from the center circle to the edge so you can get the skirt around the Christmas tree.    Just slice it with a rotary cutter or scissors. Now you could do buttons, but please, I teach at Slap Dash U, not  Fancy Pants Anal Retentive College.  You have better things to do with your time than making button holes for this baby. So we are going to use those wonderful velcro dots that you can buy from the hardware store or your closest craft store.

9. Place the dots in a line at the edge of the cut with the velcro tops on top of the dots.

10. Place other edge of Christmas tree skirt on top of the dots. And voila–you made a lovely Christmas tree skirt that will look great before and after the tree is loaded up with presents.

You gotta love a good bit of holiday inspired craftiness, no?  And bonus points for being cheap–the whole project cost me less than $10. So I can splurge on the really good rum for the egg nog! Hick!

What holiday crafting are you doing?