A Star for your Living Christmas Tree can be easily made by using a 1/4" plywood or hardboard material cut into the shape that you desire. Drill holes in the positions that you want lights, just big enough for the bulb socket to pop through snugly. Glue Foam Core to the surface and then cut a small "X" with an utility knife. The bulbs then can pop through the back and the foam core holds it in place.

Depending on the size of your star (the one we built is 36") and how many channels you use to control it, you may want to find smaller strings of lights (they make 10's and 20's if you look around).

Shapes can be anything you want, from traditional looking stars to the one you see below.

The one below can be implemented with 6, 12 or 24 channels, with each "spoke" being on a different channel (that's the way we do ours). Another idea which has worked well for people is to use a more traditional star shape and outline it with lights on one channel. Then move inward an inch or so and do a smaller outline on a 2nd channel, etc. This works well for a 6 channel star and using note commands you can do some nice sweeping effects through the star.

Here are some photos of when we rebuilt our star which is used for Thomas Road Baptist Church:

Here is the basic piece seen from the back. You can see the basic pattern, the holes drilled
through the 1/4" board and then foam core on the other side with the smaller openings.
This star / foam core has already had lights poked through, so the X's have rounded out some.
The foam core along with the snug fig of the hole in the board, holds the lights very well.

Before inserting the bulbs, we used some spray glue and then put clear or metallic glitter
on the surface to give a little extra sparkle.

Here is the finished star, fully lit. This one is 36" in size.

Hope that helps!

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Here is another example of a star made by Chuck Holliman of FBC Alexandria. This is a 6 channel star that uses concentric outline patterns for doing in/out "sweeps". This one is about 42" tall and mounts directly to the top of the tree structure (you can see the mount at the base of the star).