Yarny Crochetmas Tree

This year is the first year where I won't be spending the holiday festivities with my family in France. With my husband, we unfortunately didn't feel brave enough to go for an 11 hours flight trip with our toddler-terrors. We'll be spending our holiday break in sunny south California where the snow and the cold don't exist.

Seeing all of the lights and decorations everywhere made me realize that this year, it would be nice to have my own "sapin", as it's called in France.

After having hesitated on the shape: should I do little cones that fit into each other to give the idea of branches? should I use a stitch pattern that will give some texture? should I do an already decorated tree by alternating colors and textures?... I went with a simple cone so that I could decorate it the way I want, and change the ornaments from a year to another. Using a really bulky yarn allowed for a textured finish while using single crochet.

Here is a close up:

I bought 2 skeins of Bernat Blanket, below you can see the size of the tree after using 1 skein:

Close up on how the bead are attached within the chain and to the tree:

The cone was made by an increase of 3 stitches every other row, till reaching 102.
Then I made a flat circle to close it up at the bottom.

Since the filling was going to stretch the bottom and not leave it flat, I cut a circle in some cardboard box I had and inserted it inside.

Notes

* Stuffing something this big was difficult, I didn't manage to make it look nice and even everywhere.
* Making sure the chains spiral in a nice way all around would have been easier if I pinned them down first instead of freestyling.
* Finishing projects in the late evening means lots of little mistakes (beige beads in place of some white, uneven spirals...), let's just pretend everything was part of the design!

Numbers!

I was curious to know how many stitches this tree totaled:
* magic ring with 6 single crochet and increasing by 3 every other row till row 65 = 3558 stitches
* flat circle from magic ring with 7 single crochet and increasing by 7 every row till row 14 = 735 stitches

4293 stitches in total for this stuffed tree, which is as tall as my little ones.