Kids crafts | Make a mini Christmas tree out of egg cartons!

Published 20 November 2016 ● Last Updated on 19 November 2022

It’s the season to be jolly, and also the season to start stressing on what to fill the days with when your kids start their holidays! Some of us will definitely be overdosing on egg-nog to deal with family time 😉 while others will be baking through the month to stock up gingerbread – either way, it’s great ’cause you’ll have all you need for this crafts activity which is a perfect project for Christmas!

The DIY idea comes from our guest blogger this week – Juhi Khanna, a card designer whose creations add a sunshine cheer to all seasons and occasions.

While I am not much into upcycled crafts, my almost-5-year-old daughter is full of ideas about how to recycle. She keeps going on and on about her often far-fetched recycling brainwaves and most of the time I simply nod in agreement with no intention of taking them up ever! But every once in a while she comes up with a gem that I find hard to ignore! The egg carton Christmas tree idea is one of them. Well, the basic idea is hers and I simply improvised.

So let’s see how we made our table top Christmas tree. We began by tearing off rows from an empty 30-egg carton. The tearing needs to be a little precise so parents might want to do this bit. Now tear off individual egg cartons and flatten them by tearing off the 4 sides almost till the middle to make it look like a flower. We will be using the wrong side of the egg cartons as the texture at the back is more interesting.

Now take some water in a big container and mix green water-based paint in it. We used green poster color.

Now’s the fun part, ask your child to soak each egg carton flower in the green paint. Make sure that each piece has completely soaked in the colors before you set it out to dry. This was Miss K’s favorite part, she was soaked in green paint by the end of it, but that was nothing to worry about as the paints we used were completely safe and washable.

Tear the petals of the egg carton flower apart and set them out to dry. Here’s a picture of Miss K’s toy animal collection looking over the drying process, did you notice the segregation of the domestic animals from the wild animals? The goat and the elephant are in between as apparently they can be either!!

We can start putting the tree together once the petals have dried completely. We start with a 6” radius green cardstock semicircle. Put together the 2 straight edges with a strong adhesive to make a cone.

Now begin pasting the petals on the cone starting from the bottom. Keep adding layers till you reach the top.

We can stop at this or add some gold accents. We applied some gold texture paste – Viva Decor Inca Gold Paint – here and there and curled up the layers a bit. We finally added a gold glitter star on the top to finish our Christmas tree.

I hope you have as much fun as we did creating our mini Christmas tree. Here’s wishing you all loads of Christmas cheer!

– Juhi Khanna

Juhi is a semiconductor engineer turned entrepreneur. Apart from running her paper crafts business, she designs cards for a few stamp companies, does freelance craft blogging and is an aspiring graphic designer. She has a 4-years-old daughter who loves paper crafts as much as her; needless to say they have a lot of fun crafting together. Follow her on Instagram for inspiration!

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