Tag: Christmas decorations

Mad for Plaid at Home for Christmas

Mad for Plaid at Home for Christmas

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Welcome to the 2015 Home for Christmas blog hop hosted by Hometalk.com and Country Living.com. I’m so excited to be a part of this fun and can’t wait to share a little Christmas decorating tip with you. You also might want to grab a cup of cocoa (with loads of mini marshmallows), find a comfy chair and follow all the other bloggers along the way. You can also follow the hop at #homeforchristmas.

Plaid is absolutely the bomb right now. . . wait a minute, I don’t think “the bomb” is the bomb right now, but eh, I’m going with it anyway. If you are as mad for plaid as I am, I have an easy and affordable way to add this colorful tartan to your holiday décor.

You could venture out to find just the right kind o’ plaid ribbon spools to fit the bill, but these seem rather difficult to come by and often don’t successfully mimic the original. Instead, shorten your quest for perfection by just buying the real thing. That’s right, purchase a few yards of actual plaid fabric (which comes in a huge variety of colors and patterns) at your local craft or sewing store and cut it into strips to use wherever you normally would ribbon.

Simply decide how wide a strip you need, make a small cut in the fabric and tear it to full length going with the grain. This tearing technique gives your tartan pieces a more rustic look and let’s you decide exactly how wide your fabric “ribbon” will be for each specific use. Here are just a few uses for tartan tidbits around my holiday house, but the sky’s the limit when it comes to plaidifying your place.

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This little lantern vignette sits in the front porch wicker chair that has been stripped of its cushions. The little touch of tartan adds a whimsical and rustic flare to the my Christmas decorations.

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My son and I took a nice stroll into the woods this week to cut the evergreen boughs that adorn my childhood sled. The skates were a garage sale find from many years ago.

These homemade plaid bows are perfect for the store-bought faux pine wreaths that hang in my two front windows. It’s almost as if I cut up one of my husband’s cozy shirts to give our home a warm hug for the holidays.

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 These petite grapevine wreaths hang in the decorative windows in my living room. I used to hang them with ribbon, but in my search for the perfect plaid I found that cutting strips of material just the right width was a better solution.

Spreading Last Year’s Christmas Cheer

Spreading Last Year’s Christmas Cheer

While we might have used some “warmer” days to decorate our home’s exterior for the holidays, the inside has yet to see a lick of Christmas cheer. Things are about to change today but who knows how long the whole decking of the halls could take, so I located a few photos of last year’s decor to share with you today. I hope it gets you in the mood to throw a little tinsel or beautify some boughs of holly of your own.

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I used artificial greenery, pinecones and splashes of red to create a simple but welcoming entrance.
That’s my old childhood sled leaning by the door and I purchased those white ice skates several years ago just for this purpose.

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 I love the vintage toy soldiers and Santa that light up the yard at night.
Our son loves those silly little gel clings and moves them around the windows all season long.

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 The fireplace is decked with greenery and pinecones, which is the perfect backdrop for stockings, angels and of course the Christmas tree.

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O’ Christmas Tree

O’ Christmas Tree

finaltreeqewt952a8d1deb6bd4We have a big, beautiful Christmas tree we decided to abandon in the basement this year. It’s not that we don’t love it, but the mammoth thing is nine feet tall and six feet wide and feels like the love child of a hippo and porcupine when you’re dragging it up a narrow flight of stairs. So instead of hauling and hoisting the big girl this year, we decided to go with a bare-bones six footer I bought really cheap a few years ago. I thought it was a good idea until my husband set it up in the living room — the poor thing just looked so sad, and short.

I thought and thought of ideas to add a few feet to the height of the tree and a bit of charm without dipping into my pocketbook. Suddenly it occurred to me that we had a large urn holding some dying pansies out front and it might just be the ticket. So my husband and I dumped out a bit of dirt, pulled off the tree stand and stabbed in the tree . I wedged some rocks and pieces of wood in place to secure the trunk and surprisingly enough it turned out to be quite steady. . . and cute. It also added about two feet to the overall height, and even withstood the decorating process, which included the help of a certain three-year-old boy.

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