A Community of Christmas Trees

Our local Parish Church - the big one, in town - is holding its annual Community Christmas Tree Festival. As usual, my own church set up a tree, decorated by our Starting Rite members. (Starting Rite is a 5 week course for parents and their babies, which explores baptism, and their logo is apparently feet!)

So, not too many words in this blog - but a few pics of some of the trees I admired the most. Have to say, though, they are all brilliant for different reasons - and there were 120 to see!

To start off, here's our St. Mary in Charnwood tree:

All the babies who'd been on the Starting Rite course gave a sock, and had their name added to it.

The teeniest, tiniest toes were Charlotte's - right at the top of the tree.

Keeping with children - this was one nursery's egg box and cereal packet tree...

If I remember right, this was a school's craft club...lots of very clever ideas on the one pallet tree...

There were two 'book' trees, but I liked this one because it was made out of thick tomes which described all you needed to know about every aspect of citizen's rights, supplemented with tags describing people's responses to the help they'd received from the Citizen's Advice Bureau...

Lots of guiding trees in evidence, but this was my favourite - a treeful of Brownies, made out of plastic cups...

And where there are guides, there are usually scouts! A tent tree - complete with papier mache scout, cub and beaver heads peeking out of it...

Huge tissue paper flowers on this Gardening Group one - each large flower's about two feet across!

Now to a treeful of angels. Book folding seems to be a big thing at the moment - I'm torn between loving the finished product and hating to see pages creased. But this tower of angels looked amazing.

You've heard of the Great British Bake Off - well there was a tree decorated as the Great British BISQUE off, by the pottery club of the Grammar School. I have never seen so many gingerbread men. And I loved the bunting made from cake cases...

Now, my favourite tree of the lot. Made by a group called Charnwood Threads, the idea was simple - here's a white triangle of felt/fabric. Now decorate it using needlework.

Biggest triangles are probably 4-5" from base to tip

Oh my - I could've posted so many more photos of the individual decorations, because they were all exquisitely stitched. But here's a flavour...

Frayed fabric strips...

A string of felt tree lights...

Minute patchwork hexagons...

 

Simple threads...

 And the prize for the biggest variety of tree types in one submission? This one  - a winter wonderland of trees made from knitting, paper, felt, card, books...have I got them all?

In a break with Squidge Christmas traditions, I will be putting up a tree Chez Squidge tomorrow - mainly because I'm cooking an early Christmas dinner for eleven (!) on Saturday so we thought we'd better be a bit festive. Pictures will follow...even though it's only about three feet high.

Right, I'm off to defrost a 12lb turkey. See you later!