How to Shape an Artificial Christmas Tree

Video Transcript

"Ho! Ho! Ho! I'm Matt Cail, and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you today how to set up and decorate an artificial Christmas tree. Right now, our artificial Christmas tree looks, shall we say, anorexic. So we need to work on that by shaping the branches. A lot of these actual little branches are actually made out of plastics or other synthetics which are actually meant to bow and bend, which is nice because we can compact them for storage, but then fluff them out to make a better looking tree. I recommend, in difference to how we actually made the tree (which was from bottom to the top), to actually go from the top down. Because, the thing of it is, is usually you want to be bringing the branches down. Often times they will be up, kind of like a closed flower. So what you want to do, starting at the top, you just start to press down to get these branches closer to a ninety degree angle. Now, they don't have to be all out at ninety degrees. Actually, if you've seen real trees, especially at the top, the branches will largely be going upward. They won't be going totally flat. So basically what you are going to do is continue this and make sure that they are not...that a lot of the gaps in the tree are gone. So this is going to be a process that you are even going to have to stop, look at things, take a step back and then basically go down here and start working on filling out the branches. You'll notice that slowly, but surely, you'll start to get a lot more of a realistic tree shape going on. A lot of the branches will start covering the gaps and you won't really see as much of the branches as you did before, especially if you are doing it right. You can go back in and fill in the gaps until you have a nice, full tree. "