Tree making guide

Step three – Cleaning up your Seafoam.

After you have selected the Seafoam branches that you intend to use it is important to soak them in warm water. This makes them easy to manipulate and less likely to break. Simply collect all the pieces together and place them into a bucket or bowl with warm water. If you are doing several trees at a time you will need to make sure that you know how to differentiate between the branches again once they’re out of the water. You can do this in many ways, the easiest we find is to paint a small part of the “trunk” with a specific colour i.e. all the branches for my large 3 piece tree have a part painted red. The colour that you use makes no difference as the trees will be painted later, remember though not to use the same colour for more than one tree.

After the trees have soaked for 10 minutes or so take them out one at a time and remove any leaves that are on them. Do this with a pair of tweezers. Since you have soaked your trees you should find this very easy.

On a single piece tree hold your tree at arms length and cut off any “branches” from the bottom 5cm or so of the “trunk”, this will leave you with a suitable length trunk for later and make holding the tree itself easier.

On a two piece tree hold the two parts opposite each other and trim the “branches” off each piece that would meet in the middle. See the image for more details. This will make an area between your two trunks that is free of branches.

Leave the branches at the top of each tree in place.