the faraway tree

I've been wanting somewhere to hang my more delicate jewellery on for a while now. I have this big empty wall in my room which was crying out for some attention so yesterday I finally got around to making my own jewellery tree. It's the perfect way to display my favourite pieces and create a feature out of what is essentially an old branch! Not to mention the fact that it cost me ZERO DOLLARS, considering what you can pay for some of those flat pack cardboard trees I reckon I did pretty well.

The important part is getting the right branch! I scoured my local park after a very windy day and found a heap of great branches from gum trees and paperbarks. It was hard choosing just one branch as they all had elements that I really liked, but I settled on this paperbark one which has 3 main 'prongs' (if that's what you call them?) and a fantastic, almost right angle, in it. It had heaps of spindly twigs on the outermost branches that wouldn't of been able to hold anything up so I cut off most of them, leaving a few interesting twigs for visual impact. It was really hard to know what to leave and what to prune to keep the whole thing looking fairly natural. After pruning I smoothed it down with sandpaper to get rid of any loose bark and naughty spiders lurking about, then, with the help of my handy-man father, found a piece of wood for the base and drilled a hole in it to fit the branch. The hole had to be on one side to counter-balance the sharp angle of the branch, adding to the asymmetry of the whole piece.

I was going to spray-paint the tree and base white, but decided against it when my dad told me I would probably need more than one coat of paint... Laziness prevailed, but I stand by the benefits of leaving a piece of nature in it's natural state because I love how organic it looks.