Materials

Construction

Foliage
Take a cheap plastic Christmas tree and cut off the needles which will give you a load of pieces which look like a Yucca leaf or an Iris leaf. Take a piece of 15 amp fuse wire a few inches long and bend 3 millimetres at one end back on itself. Then bend most of it to so that it can stand on the table with the bent end up in the air - a bit like a cobra rearing to strike. The bit bent back at the top is so that the glue will key to the wire better. Put a very small dab of glue around the end, then take each plastic leaf and melt the end against the glue gun and quickly push it on to the end of the wire.

Leaf Arrangement
I t would take a lot of typing to describe the arrangement of the leaves, but it will look much better if you stick the leaves on so that they are at the angle they would be growing at on a real plant. If you are not sure, go take a look at a real Yucca plant or a Cordyline, see how the new leaves grow vertically out from the top and then fall down to the sides as they age, so that you end up with a spiky ball.

Trunk
When all these are stuck on and it has cooled for a few minutes to let the glue set, cut the wire to leave about a quarter of an inch (6 or 7 mm) sticking out from the centre of the ball. This is then stuck into a hole bored in the end of a suitable twig to produce the stem. A stem branching into 3, each with a spiky head, at slightly different heights, seems to provide a pleasing arrangement. If you don't have a suitably shaped twig, use a couple of twigs glued together with wood glue to create one. Alternatively make a frame out of wire (the insulated copper stuff used for wiring up houses would be ideal), and then clad this with milliput.

Texture the base