After a recent poll on my Instagram it was clear over 90% of you LOVE Christmas and wanted to see the decorations I chose last year and details on how I created my ‘Christmas Look’
When we lived in Australia, Christmas in July is a real thing. Supposedly the ‘coldest’ month of the year to celebrate Christmas, even though its probably warmer than a Spring/Autumn day here in England! I decided to take this month as a chance to write this blog and then I promise not to speak of Christmas again until at least November 🙂
This year I’m not going to change any decorations, I’ll just be adding more….
This Christmas will be 3 years since I completely changed my home decor and with it my Christmas decorations from brown & gold to grey and silver. As if Christmas isn’t costly enough, when I decided I wanted to change all my decorations, my OH wasn’t overly impressed, so this look has been built up over the past 2 years. The first Christmas we spent in our newly renovated home my Christmas tree was quite bare compared to how it is now, so don’t loose heart when yours instantly doesn’t seem to have the ‘wow’ factor, it takes time to build up your own collection of decorations and find the right ones.
This is my tree the year we had ‘just’ finished renovating. Nothing special just a few boxes of white and silver baubles and some snow spray.
And this was my tree last year, maybe not completely finished but looking a lot fuller, with some newly sourced decorations.
CREATING THE LOOK:
I had SO many messages about my tree last year. Unfortunately I can’t link the exact one as we bought this in Australia and brought it back with us. I do really love this tree, so finding the right one is quite important. It’s not a flocked one, just a standard green tree, but has lovely realistic branches.
First job is to flock the tree. I used a box of self adhesive artificial snow that I found on Amazon, it was really easy to do, you just spray the tree with water and sprinkle on the fake snow, slowly building it up to get thicker and thicker. This then gives the tree the perfect base look, ready to dress with decorations.
Probably 95% of my decorations on the tree were from The Range. I’ve shopped about in lots of stores but you can’t beat the selection in there and better still the price. in 2016 I bought my first lot which made up my fairly bare tree and in 2017 they were still stocking the same designs which was brill so I could top up my collection, but I also found some new beauties.
These stunning Poinsettia’s were my favorite find from last year. They were very much in demand as I could only get a few at a time, I was literally in The Range every other day checking for new stock and I hope they stock them again this year as I still need more. These are brilliant ‘gap’ fillers as they come on a long stem and have a clip, so you can just slot them in where needed to fill and unwanted hole in the tree that a bauble cant fill.
I also wanted something to wrap around the tree as a feature in 3 sections, and guess where I found this gorgeous sparkly silver leaf garland….You guessed it, The Range! Once again I underestimated how much I would need and only bought 5 lengths of it. They never had any more in, so again I’m hoping I can grab some more this year.
Once It’s all decorated I still finish off with some spay snow from a can to go on the tips of the branches. This stuff doesn’t last too long and every few days you will need to top up your snow on the tree.
Last year I really was in love with my Christmas tree and how this whole room finally looked. The only other decorations I had in here were the light up trees on the windowsill, the little reindeer’s on the mirrored tray and my Nutcracker, again all from The Range. My Tree skirt was from Next but I bought that back in 2015 and I’ve never seen it since unfortunately.
The tree is the main feature and the most important part of your decorating. The kids love to help add the baubles on this tree and I let them go wild adding them where they want, then afterwards once they’re bored I’ll go around and move them into place. We also have another little tree which moves around the house every year (last year my daughter wanted it in her bedroom) It’s filled with all the decorations they have made at school over the years and the special little ones we’ve bought. I love my feature tree and how it all matches, but that little one holds lots of memories and is very special.
DINING ROOM DECOR:
This was the first year I decorated the Dining room and I loved how it all turned out.
So I bought my Christmas tree from Asda in December 2017. It’s a beautiful 6ft Flocked tree and was only £30!!! An absolute bargain I knew I needed.
The decorations for this tree were the original ones I used on my main tree back when we lived in Australia & our first Christmas back in the UK. Even back then when I was a fan of brown and gold I knew I wanted to do something different with my tree, so I spent ages thinking of and creating this look…..
If you can recognise this spot, this is now where our current TV wall is. Quite a few baubles had been knocked off in the move so there are a few patches that needed fixing but it was so much work to take them all off and attach new ones I just left it, and with adding this onto a smaller tree in the dining room last year it worked perfectly, and they fit great.
To create this look I bought some green gardening wire and tubes and tubes of cheap gold baubles in a variety of sizes, I can’t even tell you how many I bought but it was a lot….
Then I just literally cut the string from them and strung them all along the wire, mixing up sizes between large, medium and little small ones. When it comes to putting the decorations away this one certainly takes no time at all, you just lift them off and lay them in the box! These had been sat in the loft for the past 2 years so I finally decided to find a use for them, even though they are gold they worked really well in the dining room.
The other decorations I added in here were the lights in the window, these were a bargain from Ebay – I’ve Linked them HERE if you’d like to shop.
The garland down the middle of the table was also from The Range.
Everything else I already had….. The place mats were from Tesco and I use them all year round.
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Hope you enjoyed reading about my Christmas Decor, I can’t wait to see what this year brings!
Lots of Love, Danielle x
HOUSETOHOME 
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