DIY Birch Candle Holders and Mini Trees

These were fun projects to make even though there was no paint involved. Also they were basically free, my favourite kind.

We headed out to the woods to cut down a birch tree. Our property is full of them, we have even transplanted a few closer to the house when we first moved here that are huge now.

DIY birch candle holders, DIY birch mini trees. — Follow the leader.

Once we picked out the tree, Jim got to work cutting it down.

Then cut the limbs off…

And we carried the pieces home…

We took them to the chop saw and cut 3 pieces for the candle holders at 4, 5, and 6 inches.

Then we eyeballed the slices for the trees at about 1/2 inch thick taking the slices from different sections of the tree trunk so they would graduate from biggest to smallest like a tree. See where I’m going with this? We even took a few slices from the thinner branches.

From there, they sat here over the air intake register for a month to dry out.

The only purchase for this project was LED flickering battery operated tea lights. Jim took the candle holders out to the workshop along with one of the tea lights, using it to measure for the size of the bit for the drill.

He found the center of the wood…

and drilled down so just the top edge of the tea light would be above the candle holder.

Before I show you them finished, lets move on to the trees shall we.

I stacked up the wood slices and some needed to be turned around to keep the trees straight. Once they were as straight as they were going to be, I marked each slice down one side with a black marker like so.

Started hot glueing on the second from the bottom working my way from biggest to smallest, lining up the dots from the marker…

I pressed them together while the glue dried.

I saved one small slice for each tree to put on the bottom to raise them up.

In my mind these trees were going to be a lot taller, like 4 or 5 inches taller. In the spring I think we are taking down a birch tree that has expanded a little too close to the house and at that time I will take off the little piece at the bottom and add a few more slices. Until then, here they are on our floating shelves…