After our trips to the hardware store to see their Christmas trees, I was eager to try out some things on my own.
My mother said I could decorate her tree, so some of our Interns and I gave it a try.
She had all the ornaments sorted by color, in boxes, and gave us permission to do it up how we liked it, and then left to run some errands.
That may or may not have been a wise idea.
As I looked over the choices of ornaments. I realized that, silly as it sounds, I needed more ideas!
So, after all these posts I had done on Christmas trees on my own blog, I ended up on the Internet looking for yet another tree to inspire me.
And this is what I found. I liked the way this lady had colors in her house decor that were the same as the tree--either the tree pulled the house colors together, or vice-versa. Well, there was something candy-jar exciting about the whole thing.
My Interns were a bit skeptical.
I looked around at the light pink walls, the white trim and furniture, the sea-foam green cushions on the couch, the coral pink throw, the bird cage collection and the silver accessories, and decided I would do ALL the colors.
Fortunately, I remembered once in a while to take pictures of the decorating process:
First I added globe-lights to the already pre-lit tree. They gave an extra dimension to the lights. Then I put on iridescent white garlands. Then the interns started loading the tree with Christmas balls. Here, we have dark pink, sparkly white and really light sea-foam green balls. If we left the tree at this point, it would have been fine.
I wanted to really cram it full of ornaments, though.
After more balls, we put in little white sleds, sparkly white poinsettias, and birds. Some single ornaments went on too, including a glittery pine cone.
If we had left it alone here it would have been fine.
Then I really went to town and started adding giant candy. One of my helpers started to get nervous and to object strongly-- it was too over-the-top! It was getting a bit cluttered, so I edited it. We retained the blue birds, the pink birds, the words, and the pink and white icicles, though.
And here is the final result. My mother really was surprised, but it turns out, she likes it!
I noticed that we ended up with a bird theme going on, which wasn't planned, but it was too hard to resist all those sparkly cute birds. (Interestingly, the lady whose tree I used for inspiration recently posted another tree, which also has a bird theme!)
I really wanted to try putting something large and unexpected in the tree, though. Just to see what it was like. I looked around wondering what to do. I was still nervous about putting heavy things in the tree, wired or not.
I remembered the little birdhouses in one of the hardware store trees. Maybe we needed some houses for all those little birds to live in.
So far, the only new items purchased for this tree were the poinsettias for the top. I thought instead of buying more items, I would make my own light-weight birdhouses out of card stock.
And here they are. Quite unexpected.
I'm not sure I like it.
But it was fun to make all those birdhouses!
Here are some close-ups of the other ornaments:
Chandelier
One of the birds
One of the poinsettias
One of the birdhouses. I did several different shapes, just freehand. This was the easiest one to do.