A Re-purposed Christmas Tree

The other day I was reading a post by my friend Vel about collections, I fell in love with her pretty books and  brass apple collections. Then I pause to think about the collections I have but at that moment nothing came, hmmm as I said there, collections are not in my DNA.

Later on, I remembered that yes, I have some collections...
Letters written to me by my siblings and friends, it's not growing any longer now that we use e-mails ;)...
All the cards my kids have given me thru the years ...
Christmas cards from friends and family, kind of sentimental stuff.
And I also collect items like these:

Empty ribbon spools

I just cannot throw them away! Maybe this is not a collection but a hoarding problem :) But when the ribbons are gone I think the spools can be re-used.
I used lots of them when creating the Ribbon Spool Pumpkin, remember? but I still have many more, and it looks like they love me :)  The other day while at Home Depot with my husband I found the big black spool I'm using here, inside one of their trash cans. I thought it was beautiful and immediately picked it up. You can imagine Mr. RLC's face! :D

That black spool gave me the idea of a ribbon spool Christmas tree. It was time to utilize those chunky spools ;)

Perfect shape but a bit too plain!  Some burlap, jute webbing...

Hot glue...

And of course, some blink.

A wooden spool, one of the latest in "my collection", serves as a base ;)

Finally, a cinnamon stick star tops it off!

Ta da! At least now I have a Christmas tree.

It is time for me to work on the real one, there are home tours all around blog land that I'm feeling so far behind! At least I'm getting lots of inspiration ;)

Thanks so much for your nice comments on my last post!