How to Fluff a Fake Tree So It Stops Looking Fake

The first artificial tree I ever bought looked incredible in the listing photo and looked like a bottle brush on a stick when I got it out of the box. I stood there in our living room in Tennessee thinking I’d been sent the wrong item. I hadn’t. I just didn’t know that a fake tree comes to you squashed flat, and that turning it back into a tree is a job — an actual, set-aside-your-evening job that nobody puts on the box!

So here’s the thing nobody warned me about, and I’m warning you: fluffing a 7 ft tree takes about two hours the first year. Not fifteen minutes. Two hours! Once you know that going in, it stops being frustrating and starts being kind of relaxing (I put on a movie, and honestly it’s one of my favorite nights of the season now). Here’s exactly how I do it.

1. Put on real gloves before you touch anything

I skipped this my first year and my forearms looked like I’d lost a fight with a cat. Those PVC needle tips scratch, and the wire cores inside the branches are sharp where they got cut at the factory. I spent the next three days explaining myself to people at church!

Now I use a pair of rubber coated bamboo garden gloves and I will never fluff a tree without them again! The reason I went with the coated palm instead of a thick work glove is that you still need to feel the tiny tips to separate them. A big padded glove makes you clumsy and you’ll take it off after ten minutes, which defeats the whole thing. Long sleeves help too, y’all.

2. Work bottom row to top row, all the way around

This is the single change that saved me the most time! Start with the bottom row of branches and finish it completely — all the way around the tree — before you move up to the next row.

If you start at the top (which I did, because it seemed logical?), every time you reach down or lean past a finished branch you knock it out of place, and you end up fluffing the same rows two and three times! Going bottom to top means you’re always working above what’s already done and you never disturb it.

One more thing that only took me three years to figure out: fluff the bottom section before you stack the next section on top of it. Most trees come in two or three hinged sections. If you assemble the whole tree first, you’re crawling under it to reach the bottom branches with the rest of the tree in your face. Do the bottom section on its own, then add the middle, then the top.

3. Pull each branch out from the trunk first

Before you touch the little tips, grab the whole branch where it meets the pole and pull it out and down until it sits roughly horizontal, or even tips down a little at the end. Most trees ship with every branch folded up against the trunk like a closed umbrella, and if you skip this step you’re just fluffing tips on a skinny column!

The branches are wired inside, so they hold whatever shape you bend them into. Don’t be gentle about it! I was so nervous the first year that I barely moved anything, and the tree stayed narrow all season. You want that bottom row reaching out far enough that the tree has an actual silhouette.

4. Fan the smaller tips into a V

Here’s the part that makes a fake tree stop looking fake. Each branch has smaller stems coming off the main one. Take those and fan them out so about half point up toward the ceiling and half point down toward the floor, with the tip of the branch staying more or less level. From the side it looks like a V, or a peace sign if that’s easier to picture.

Real evergreen branches aren’t flat. They have depth going up and down, and that’s what your eye reads as “real.” A fake branch left the way it came out of the box is a flat plane, and no amount of ribbon or ornaments fixes that. Do this for every single branch. Yes, every one! This is where the two hours goes.

While you’re there, angle a few tips toward the trunk instead of away from it. Filling in that dark hollow area near the pole is what keeps you from seeing straight through the tree when you walk past it.

5. Snip the tips that fight you

Some branches come out of the box kinked at a hard angle or with a stray stem crossing over another one, and no amount of bending fixes it. I keep a pair of micro-tip pruning snips in my decorating bin for exactly this. The curved blade gets in between crowded tips where scissors can’t, and I use them to take off the one or two mangled stems that are ruining an otherwise fine branch.

You will not miss two tips on a 700 tip tree. You will absolutely notice one stem sticking straight out at a weird angle for the entire month of December!

6. Wire the gap that shouldn’t be there

Sometimes you’ll get to the end and there’s one spot where two branches just refuse to cover the pole, usually where the sections join. Instead of rearranging the whole row, I use green floral wire to pull a neighboring branch over into the gap and tie it in place.

It’s a tiny amount of wire, it disappears against the branch, and it stays put all season. This is also how I fix a tree that leans one direction because the branches on one side are heavier — I just pull a few over and tie them where I want them.

7. Fill the rest with picks, not more ornaments

After all of that you’re still going to have holes. Every fake tree has them. My instinct the first year was to cram ornaments into the gaps, and it looked terrible! A big shiny ball inside a hole just draws your eye directly to the hole.

Picks work because they read as branches. I use a mix of frosted pine picks for the genuinely empty spots and glitter berry stems for the smaller ones that just need a little something. Fluff the pick itself before you stick it in (same V trick), then push the stem in toward the trunk so it looks like it grew there rather than like it’s sitting on top.

If you have really big gaps, I went deeper on this in 4 Ways to Make Any Tree Look Full — including the fiber fill trick, which sounds strange and works beautifully.

8. Get a step stool, not a chair

I have balanced on a dining chair to reach the top of a tree with a toddler underfoot, and I do not recommend it! A cheap two step folding stool folds flat behind a door and it means you can actually see the top rows straight on instead of squinting up at them. The top third of the tree is the part everyone sees when they walk in, and it’s the part most of us fluff the worst because we’re reaching.

One last thing

Step back every twenty minutes or so and look at the whole tree from across the room, and from the doorway you’ll actually walk in through. Up close you’re seeing individual branches. From ten feet away you see holes you’d never notice with your nose in it.

And the good news: next year is faster. Way faster. The wire in the branches remembers the shape you bent it into, so if you store the tree without crushing it, you’re mostly just touching things up. That first two hours buys you five or six easy seasons!

If you fluff your tree this year and it finally looks the way you wanted it to, please post it on Instagram and tag me @sugardesignco — I want to see it!

-Ciera

Made something with this? Tag me @sugardesignco — I love seeing them.