I’m betting we ALL need to save some cash this time of year. In today’s Frugal Friday tip, I’m going to teach you to make your own Christmas tree. That means you don’t have to buy one. It just takes a few simple steps. Once you begin to understand how you can take simple shapes and modify them to create your own designs, you’ll start saving lots of money.

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Step 1: Draw a triangle

You may not know this, but the Silhouette Studio software has a drawing to to create regular polygons. Those are shapes with equal sides and angles, and you can choose how many sides there are. You’ll find this in the left side icon bar. The 4th option down is where you can draw a rectangle, rounded rectangle or circle. It’s that last one many folks don’t know about. It looks like a pentagon so some people just ignore it, thinking they don’t have any use for a pentagon. But you can use it for triangles, hexagons, octagons and all the other “-gons” you desire.

Here’s how you use it. Hover over whatever shape is showing in that icon bar. It will be the rectangle by default, or whatever shape you used last in the current software session. That expands the menu soo you see your choices. Click the pentagon, then move your cursor to the mat area. You’ll notice that when you clicked on the Draw a Regular Polygon, the cursor became a little plus sign to indicate you are in the mode to create something. Click and drag to draw out your shape. Here’s the big trick — hold the ALT key as you draw so that the bottom of the shape is flat horizontally.

It’s going to draw a pentagon, but that’s okay. Let go of the mouse when you’ve got generally the size you want.

Now see that slider bar in the middle of the shape? That’s were you choose the number of sides. Move it down to 3 and you have an equilateral triangle. That’s the basis for your tree.

Adjust the height or width if you want so that it’s a taller or squattier triangle.

Step 2: Replicate the triangle

You’re going to make triangles — one for every tier you want in your tree. I’m going to go with 3.

HINT: Odd numbers usually look best in design.

I’ll use the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD+↓ to make an exact copy just below each time. You can do them all at the beginning, Or, duplicate below once, resize the lower one, then duplicate that second one below and resize the third one. It will make a difference in the next step, so experiment to see which you like best.

Step 3: Resize some of the triangles

You don’t have to do this step, but usually a tree has longer branches at the bottom than the top. So you want each triangle as you go down to be larger.

You can do this with just the resizing squares at the corners of the bounding boxes, but I want to show you a different way in the Transform panel. This will keep them aligned and also allow you to increase each by the same percentage. The second tab in the Transform panel is for scale — resizing by a set percentage or setting an exact size. I’m going to use the former.

I select my middle triangle and set the scale at 125%. That makes it 25% larger than the top one. I like to do it by backspacing out the current percentage and typing in my own. Then I hit enter and it resizes, keeping it aligned with the top one.

Next, I select the lowest one and set it at 150%. That makes is 1 1/2 times the size of the top one. If you want it resized in relation to the middle one, you’ll want to replicate the middle one and then resize. It just depends on your personal preference. Here are my 3 triangles now.

If you want, you can move the triangles closer together.

By varying your sizes, proportions and spacing, you can get many different looks.

Step 4: Add a tree trunk

Draw a simple rectangle at the bottom and align all the pieces along the vertical axis with Align Centers.

Step 5: Weld (optional)

I like to visualize how my shape is going to look before I use any Modify tool. Here’s a trick for welding: change the line colors to clear (none). I’ve done that here, as well as change the colors to green and brown and I sent the trunk to the back of the order.

If you want your tree all as a single, solid piece, weld everything. I did that to use it on my Christmas tags. Or, weld just the triangles for cutting from green and brown, or leave them all separate to cut the triangles from different papers also.

And here I’ve added more tiers to my tree–

Want a tree with curved branches?

First, use Object>Convert to Path to change your triangle into a normal shape, then use Point Editing to change flat line segments to curved segments.

Once you get going, you can come up with all sorts of trees!