DIY Raffia Christmas Trees

Learn how to make this quick and simple DIY project, raffia Christmas trees. The neutral color fits into any decorating scheme and the natural fibers of the raffia add great texture! They are the perfect addition to your Christmas décor!

Evidently I am in Christmas cone tree mode this year! In addition to the forest of glitter cone trees I shared with you last week, I also made these DIY raffia Christmas trees. 

I love how they turned out!! Initially, I made some pumpkins like this to share with you on the blog, however did not get around to posting it. Ugh! Well now I have something to share with you all next fall. 😉

While I was making the pumpkins, I thought how cool raffia covered Christmas trees would look. I checked around on Pinterest to see if there was anything out there like that already and I could not find anything. So I set off to try to make some. Not to toot my own horn, but I was right! They look amazing! Ha!

They actually look even better in real life because you don’t notice the white spaces in between the braids like you do in the pictures. I love the texture of the braided raffia. It looks great paired with the texture of the white cone trees I made a couple years ago.

Supplies to make raffia trees

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use. If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase. I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself.

• Poster board – you can get single pieces at Walmart, I made about 5-7 trees out of one piece of poster board depending on the size of the trees
• Tape
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks
• Pencil
• Piece of string
• Scissors
• Yardstick/Tape measure
• Raffia – I found mine at Walmart. Depending on the size of your trees you may need more than one bag of the raffia shown above. I made a 13″ and a 9″ tree and needed more than one bag. Or you could just buy the bigger bag to make sure you have enough, that is what I did on my second trip to Walmart. Doh!

How to make the Cone Trees

I am not going to go over how to make the cone trees again since I just shared that. 🙂 Check out my DIY glitter cone trees post for those instructions. 

Braiding the Raffia

The raffia comes in long pieces about 3-4 feet in length. I counted out 15 individual pieces to braid for the trees. These pictures were taken when I was making the pumpkin and for that, I only used 12 strands total because I wanted a finer braid. However, for the trees I wanted a chunkier braid so I used more. 

I used a clothespin to hold the ends of the raffia, you could also use a binder clip. In fact, that may actually work better, sometimes a piece would slip out of the clothespin when I was starting to braid it. Separate the strands into three groups of five.

Start braiding the raffia. As you braid, the ends of the raffia will also “braid” itself so you will have to pull out the ends of one of your groups of 5 occasionally to untangle the strands.

After I got a little bit braided, it was easier to hold the braid between my knees to add some tension to the braid. You could also tape it to the table but this worked well for me.

When I finished the braid, I just tied a short piece of raffia on each end to keep the braid from unraveling and removed the clothespin. Make a lot of the braids at once so you can glue several on at a time. I used 10 braids on the 13″ tree and 7 braids on the 9″ tree.

Gluing on the braids

Before attaching the braid to the tree, I would add a bit of hot glue into the end of the braid to secure it. I cut off the ends of the strands right above where I glued. I wanted it to look like one continuous braid on the tree, so I did not want to glue down any unbraided portion.

Starting at the bottom back of the tree, I ran a bead of hot glue and held the first braid to it for a couple seconds to attach it.

Continue gluing the braid down around the tree.

On the first tree I made, I glued the first strand straight on and it left a little bit of a gap when butting up the second loop around. The front of the tree looked great however. 🙂 So on the second tree, I started the braid at a bit of an angle to try to eliminate that gap. Then I cut off the part of the braid that was sticking off the tree and hot glued the end down. I don’t have a picture of that but it did look better.

When I came to an end, I tried to make it as seamless as possible. Make sure all the loose strands of the ends are glued down. Just continue until you reach the top of the cone.

For the tip, wrap the braid around it and cut of the end. Use lots of glue to make sure it is all glued down.

That is it, pretty quick and painless, right? Well, unless you burn yourself on hot glue, not that I did that at all. LOL. I don’t think that is avoidable, but if someone has a tip for that, let me know!

These trees would look amazing with a neutral color scheme but really they would work great with any color scheme. After all, I am using lots of color this year and they fit in perfectly! I will be back soon to share another fun DIY project with you. Have a wonderful day!