Tree-Free Cheapo Christmas! (Homemade Decorations)

Member Name: KathrynMackinnon

Product:	Homemade Decorations
Date:	17/12/00 (181 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap and totally unique

Disadvantages: Time Consuming -o.k if you enjoy doing crafty stuff!

Two naughty little kittens, named Marley and Dylan, are destroying everything that is within their reach in my home. I am told this will not improve. Therefore i have this year created a tree-free christmas!

First of all, I took myself down to Au Naturale and bought a selection of leaf skeletons (yes, all the little ventricles and veins that were left after the rest rotted away)for 90p a pack of about 30 and some fir cones - mostly broken and so reduced to 5p each(got loads). I also bought a ceramic head of Michelangelo's 'David' and a 'Venus de Milo' just in case! (99p each)
I then bought some tealights (available everywhere) and some glitter, tinsel, silver and gold spray paints, decorative threads and pva glue and card.

I piled it all up on my kitchen table.

(I had a box of little polestyrene squiggles left after a delivery last week and so stuck those in there as well!)

I didn't really know what i was going to do with all this before i sat down and looked at it.

Basically I spray painted everything that looked boring or thought might like to be a nicer colour. This included the leaf skeletons, the fir cones , the ceramic things and the polyestyrene squiggles.
Making sure to do this on top of paper or card which can be used later.

I then threaded the polyestyrene squiggles with pretty threads to create lengths and lightly brushed them with pva glue and rolled them in a tray of glitter. I left them to dry and then dangled them from everything I could find!
They sound tacky, don't they?, but they really don't look like cheap wee bits of polyestyrene if you cover them properly.

The same idea of bough making was applied to the leaf skeletons and the fir cones. I also stuck single leaves to pieces of pastel coloured card and made them into cool wee gift tags.
The fir cones look great if you have a tree because you can place them at the base of the branches
, if it is a fake one, this is agood way of concealing the joins.
I dipped the cones in glitter and secured threads to them so that they could be attached to the base of candles . If looped on top of each other they form a wreath around the bottom and look really good on the table.

The centrepiece is a huge shrine-type affair on my mirrored sideboard (a mantlepiece would be perfect for this), with 'David's head at centre, surrounded by all of my gold things.
I also dried out some orange slices last year and i've placed them at intervals next to the tea lights and tinsel.

MAJOR WARNING:- Give any tea lights loads of space and keep an eye if there are kiddies or kitties around.
Do not place the polyestyrene boughs next to the tea lights!AAAAAh!

The spray-painted paper came in really handy as wrapping and the left over card was used to cut out more gift tag shapes.

Well, that's me sorted. Let's hope the house doesn't burn down!

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