Video Transcript

Welcome back to Fabulous Creations! I’m Ron and today I’m going to show you how I made this vintage-style tin-can tree decoration using LED bulbs from my friends over at Tru-Tone. Let’s jump on in!

I love Christmas lights and I’m all for our collective acceptance of our LED overlords. But for Christmas lights, the often-pure “digital” colors that come with big-box store Christmas lights are very off-putting to me, especially the blue. Don’t get me started on the blue. Call me old fashioned, but Christmas lights are supposed to be a little subdued. Seen, but without making my eyeballs vibrate.

That’s why I was over the moon to discover Tru-Tone LED Christmas bulbs last year. Rather than using colored LED inside their bulbs, they use warm white LEDs and painted glass. Just like the good Saint Nick intended.

Being such a huge fan of their mission to make Christmas lights non-garish again, I reached out to Tru-Tone to see if they’d be interested in working together on a project or two this holiday season. So they sent me a couple boxes of lights to show you how to build this project from their Decoration Guide.

Tru-Tone’s decoration guide has a number of beautifully illustrated light projects, but in case you need a little more guidance and specifics, this video will aim to serve as the companion video to the gallery on their website.

But enough chit-chat! Let's review the tools and supplies you're going to need for this project. You'll need: 25 tin cans; it's canned pumpkin puree and cream of mushroom soup season so this shouldn't be too hard of an ask. You'll need a variety of sizes, which is detailed in my free downloadable plan.

Complementing the cans, you’ll need a set of 25 LED C7 bulbs and light strand. Tru-Tone sells these separately, but if you already have a C7 light strand, just pick yourself up a box of their lights and call it a day.

You'll also need one eight foot length of one inch by six inch pine board, a short length of a small diameter log. Then you'll need a few basic supplies such as wood glue, hot glue and a few screws of varying lengths – one and a quarter inch and two inch should do.

For tools you'll need: an electric drill, any type of saw, a measuring tape, a three-quarter inch hole saw drill bit, a pair of pliers, and a hot glue gun. Optionally you'll need: a center punch tool, a can of green wood stain and brush, and butcher paper or other non-flimsy translucent paper or plastic.

The last thing you’ll need for this project is my template, which is available for free on my website, linked down below. I worked out a layout that uses precisely 25 lights – the number of lights in most C7 light strands – minimizing gaps as best I could and evenly placing the light colors as much as possible. My template also goes over the exact can sizes you’ll need and lists common food items (at least in the US) that come in that sized can.

Alright, let’s get building. We’ll start by cutting a hole in the back of each tin can so the lights can properly penetrate. We’ll be using a 3/4" hole saw for this, which is just the right size to let the socket through, but not the bulb, so once the bulb is screwed in from the opposite side, it’ll hold itself in place.

You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches if you mark the center of your will-be hole with a center punch tool. It’s a spring loaded tool that when pressed into an area, cocks itself and then literally “punches” the point harder into the material. The result is an indentation in your can that your hole saw’s inner drill bit can use to stay centered, rather than wandering all over the place until it gets a grip.

After all the cans are marked with the center punching tool, we can drill the larger holes that will accept the light socket. Even though our bit won’t wander, because of the center punch we made, we still need to go easy to get the best looking hole. I found that if you put too much downward pressure on the drill and thus the can, it may puncture through the other side of the can prematurely and leave sharp jagged edges on the inside, which won’t be great. But having the drill spinning too slowly was also problematic, as without the torque of the fast moving drill bit, the sawtooth edges could more easily get caught up tearing bits of metal surrounding the hole. So the winning combo is light pressure, fast drill speed.

Once all the holes are drilled in the back of the cans, an optional step you can take is to use a larger stepped drill bit like this to knock down any sharp edges you may have from the hole saw bit. I’m not really using much pressure here, just sort of letting the drill bit ride along the inside edge and clean up any rough edges as you go. Again this is optional, but is a nice assurance against accidental cuts for you or the light strands.

Then one more thing you may want to do before moving on is using a pair of pliers to flatten down any sharp edges on the inside of the can from the can opener.

Next up, let’s build our frame. I decided to pre-stain and finish my board with a green outdoor stain for decks and fences. I really like using this stain, as it’s more of a semi-transparent acrylic paint so it doesn’t have any harsh fumes like oil based stains do. I believe the color I used here is called Sagebrush green and I did 2-3 coats. This is a totally optional step, though, so feel free to leave your tree the color of bare wood if you don't want to use any stain or paint.

With my stain dried, I can cut my pieces to size. Our tree is going to have two adjoining 20 degree angles at the top and a 70 degree angle in each corner of the bottom. Now unfortunately we can't just set our miter saw to 20 degrees and call it a day. The 20 degrees listed on the saw is actually 20 degrees when reference from 90 degrees, not 20 degrees reference from zero. I'm not the best person to explain this so I'll put a few links in the description if you're curious, but basically, we need to offset our board from the base 90 degrees of the built-in miter saw fence so we'll do that by making a temporary 45 degree fence by hot gluing a scrap board to the miter saw and making two 45 degree cuts in it. Placing our board against this and doing a little math to get the angles we're after is then super easy. To get the 20 degree angle, we set the saw to negative 25 degrees. To get to the 70 degree angle, we set the saw to a positive 25 degrees. Curious how these two angles are the number 25 for a Christmas project, no? I wish I could say I planned that.

Now these cuts can be a little precarious, so make sure your boards are well clamped, adding some additional height to your temporary fence if need be, and keep your hands well out of the way of the blade. Miter saws have a tendency to jump up if they hit a knot or a warped board, so do not use your hand to support the board anywhere close to the blade.

If you don’t have a miter saw and don’t know anyone with one, your best bet to cut these is with a Japanese pull saw. Just make the angled mark on your board with a protractor and be very steady with your cuts. You may have some gaps when you close up the boards later, but that’s not a huge deal and adds to the rustic look. If it really bothers you, wood filler is your friend.

So my hardware store was actually out of 8 foot lengths of 1x6 boards, which required me to actually use two 6 foot lengths, so that’s why you see so much excess here – but the total required length is under 8 feet as I described earlier.

Being that was the case for me, I decided to make my 20 degree angle cut on both boards before cutting them to size in case I needed to recut or adjust anything – hence the giant boards sticking off my workbench. But with those angles cut, I was able to do a dry fit of those 20 degree angles by clamping them together and then clamping the combined unit to my work surface. I then placed all my cans inside to make sure that the layout I designed on the computer would actually work in the real world. Thankfully it did, which allowed me to trim my boards shorter, making it less awkward to work around.

In cutting them to size, I actually left them an inch or so long until I was ready to cut the bottom-most board to size, in case I found myself needing a smidge more length. The plan document download associated with this project details the resulting size of all of my boards, though feel free to cut your boards to whatever length or size you need to fit the cans you used if you deviated from my recommended can sizes.

Before cutting the 70 degree angles into my stained and prepped bottom board, I used a piece of scrap wood to dial in the correct length for this board such that it could nestle perfectly between the two side boards while also making the spacing between the cans a nice, tight fit. Make sure to do this with your actual cans inside the frame so that you’re measuring to the reality of your chosen can sizes. In researching standard can sizes for this project, I found that there are a lot of very closely related standard sizes, so yours may be slightly different than mine.

With that scrap board measured to a tight fit, I transferred its measurements to my stained and prepped board and cut it to size on both ends with my 45 degree fence still in place, but this time set to positive 25 degrees.

I must have screwed up transcribing my measurements, as this was still too big and the cans rattled around in there, so I snuck up on the correct size by trimming bit by bit off until it was a nice tight fit. So much for that scrap board.

After that, I was able to trim my side boards down flush to the bottom board. I just used my pull saw for this rather than messing with the miter saw, as I had that bottom board to reference off of.

Hey question for you, have those oddball non-gold / non-bronze cans been bugging you? Yeah me too. There is no requirement that the innards of your cans match, but with only a few of the 25 mismatched, it was bugging me too much, so I had to swap them out. I came back for that lone white one after making some more pizza sauce.

With one side cut to size, I transferred that measurement to the other side so that their lengths precisely matched, and cut it to size too. This is an isosceles triangle, after all.

With our final angled cut being complete on the miter saw, we can remove our temporary fence. I figured since this was just hot glue it wouldn’t require much effort to pop off, but it sort of did. I guess the glue locked itself in place with the various grooves of the built-in work surface of the saw. It's a great little hack though for adhering temporary guides or fences to your saw.

Before we can assemble everything and start gluing our cans together, we should prep our tree trunk log, if need be. This would be a great way to use a Christmas tree trunk from a prior year’s Christmas tree as long as it’s at least 4.5 to 5 inches in diameter, but I decided to use this walnut branch my neighbor gave me as it was the right size and I needed to do something with it. Do conifers have this style bark? Nope. Are most people going to notice? Probably not. It’ll be our little secret.

I cut mine to about 5 inches which seemed to be scaled appropriately to our tree, but this isn’t a firm requirement. I didn’t realize it, but this log was still pretty wet on the inside, so I painted my cut ends with some of that latex stain to try to slow down drying and prevent cracking. You probably don’t need to worry about this, though.

I initially intended to assemble the frame using wood glue alone, as to not have any visible screws or screw holes in the finished product, but a few things. 1) I forgot to sand the finish off in the areas I wanted to glue and my first glue joint failed with the slightest bit of stress on the joint, and 2) I realized this project may also appeal to folks without a full workshop and super long clamps. So let’s just use screws shall we? Starting at the bottom of the side boards, I pre-drilled two holes on each side such that my screws would come out where the bottom board of the tree connected. This meant I was drilling at a bit of an angle. I made sure to hold the bottom piece firmly in place as well so that the drill bit would penetrate the endgrain of my bottom board as well – if you don’t it’s sure to split the second the screw starts going in.

With the bottom connected, we just need to screw the top two 20 degree cuts together. This is a bit tricky, as at these extreme angles the drill bit has a mind of its own. One of my screw holes did start penetrating the opposite sides of my tree, but I just readjusted and rescrewed.

As for the screw holes? You can either fill them with wood filler, sand, and stain or paint, or leave them as they are. They’re not overly noticeable, and most people are going to be focused on the stunning lights in the front, not the screw holes.

Now because I prefinished my boards before the cutting, there were a few areas on the bottom of my tree that had unfinished areas. These, again, aren’t noticeable once the tree is standing up, but I decided to stain them quickly anyway.

Now the next step is optional, depending on whether or not you want the slight diffusion effect. I personally think the way the JewelTone bulbs reflect off the inside of the metal cans looks really cool, but my hubby doesn’t love that look and prefers the diffusion. In any case, you’ll want to find yourself a large piece of thin translucent plastic, or parchment paper. Most people are going to probably opt for parchment, as it’s easy to find large sheets of that. However, a few years ago we ordered some large cutting mats from a restaurant supply store and they accidentally sent us an entire case of these 24” mats when we had only ordered 2. It wasn’t worth their time or shipping costs to have us send them back, so I’ve got plenty to burn through and it was the perfect sturdy-ish material for this project.

The best way I found to cut it to the inside perimeter of my tree was to lay it down on my workbench, put the tree on top, then using a utility knife, trace the cut straight through the plastic. There were a few areas that didn’t cut all the way through, but as long as I had scored the area, it was easy to finish, by pulling the plastic down the blade.

Diffusion or not, we need to adhere the trunk of our tree before installing the cans. We’ll do this by finding the center of the board, stacking our tree on top of the trunk along the center line, then pre drilling a few holes down through the board and the trunk. I recommend using a countersink bit so that you don’t have screw heads sticking up over the surface of the board, interfering with the movement of the cans as you’re trying to position them.

After one final test fit to make sure our cans still fit, we can start gluing them in. Now this is going to look super weird but I wanted all my cans to sit flush inside of the tree when viewed from the front. Since the cans are varying heights in addition to diameters, the shorter tomato paste cans, for instance, would be sunk deeper into the tree than the larger whole tomato cans. We could just put them in upside down, but then all of them would be flush with the front edge, which we also don’t want. I wanted all of the cans to be level, but inset about three quarters of an inch.

My solution, as odd as it looks, was to use some random scrap pine board to use as “spacers” while I glued the cans in from behind. You can totally do this any way you want, but this worked well for me. So after confirming that all my cans would sit on at least one piece of wood, I took it all apart and reassembled it upside down. I actually did this twice – the first time on another large cutting mat, so that I could confirm my spacer trick worked as I hoped, before gluing. You obviously only need to do it once. So after reassembling my spacers and cans a final time in reverse order, I fired up my aging hot glue gun and went to work securing them in place.

Now there's really no science to this and I can't tell you exactly where to glue and where not to; I just started gluing in what seemed like key places to me: the entire bottom row, the corners, areas that were a bit of a tight fit... definitely want to get those first. And then from there I just went around finding loose cans pulling them up a bit to apply the glue and then wedging them back down. I tried to keep the glue towards the top of the cans, at least from this perspective, so that there wouldn't be any obvious hot glue drippage once we flipped it back over. Then I just went around and applied heavy beads of hot glue between the seams to minimize movement should any of the other hot glue joints come loose down the line.

After the cans were locked in place it was time for the lights. I’m using one of Tru-Tone’s light strands here because it’s got braided wire, making it less stiff and difficult to work with than your standard lamp cord C7 wire, though that can totally work too. Either way this is going to be kind of ugly on the back so don’t stress about having the best looking wire.

I started placing my sockets in the middle bottom of my tree so that the plug cord for the strand could later be easily hidden behind the trunk. Work your way up being sure not to miss any of the tomato paste cans that hide deeper in the forest of cans.

By the way, you’ll see me using something to install my bulbs in the cans. I’ve got baseball mitts where my hands should be, so it would probably take me half an hour to get a C7 bulb installed in a tomato paste can. So I made this little doo-dad to help. It’s just two paint stir sticks with three-quarter inch holes for the bulb to rest, hot glue around the holes to grip the bulb – those are then glued to to a clothespin, and I added a few rubber bands around the shaft for additional tension. I recommend making something like this to help; it only took a few minutes to make.

With that we’re finally ready to install the bulbs so our tree can come alive! I recommend plugging your light strand in so you can make sure you’re installing the bulbs in the right can, based on my project plan at least.

One more optional step that I would recommend if you’re not using a diffuser. I wanted all of my bulbs sitting straight and level inside of the cans. To achieve this, I applied copious amounts of hot glue around the socket, holding it steady while it dried. But again, not important with a diffuser.

If you’re going to use the diffuser, I recommend using hot glue or such to hold it in place, but keep in mind you’ll need to remove it to access the bulbs if you ever need to replace one or want to swap them out.

Speaking of swapping the bulbs out – lets see what it looks like with Tru-Tone’s Classicolor bulbs – these first ones are their JewelTone line. Yeah that looks really good too! I'm torn to which is my favorite though, as I've always preferred transparent bulbs on a Christmas tree but I do love the opaque ones on roof lines.

So which style bulb do you prefer in this tree? Transparent or opaque? Do you like it better with a diffuser or without? Let me know down in the comments! Either way I hope you enjoyed this little holiday project and build one of these for yourself!

I've got links to all the tools and supplies you'll need down in the description, including the link to my free downloadable project plans so be sure to check that out. And if you do decide to check out Tru-Tone, be sure to let them know I sent you! With that, I hope you have a happy and healthy holiday season and I'll see you in the next one! Cheers!