A flying sauce would be perfect! We'll see if I can find one or squeeze in the time to make one! I thought I might be able to find a futuristic looking star for a topper...
I also wanted to share some ramblings on how I glam up my standard style Christmas trees!
:tree2:
If I've shared this in the past - my apologies!!!
Artificial trees, at least, always seem to have a great deal of dead space or "holes" when they are first put up. Fluffing only goes so far, and even lights, ornaments and garland will sometimes not disguise all of it to my satisfaction.
SO, my process for putting the tree up is like this:
- Fluff all the branches as much as possible or until I run out of patience - then I take a break and do something else and come back to it!
- Into the "holes" I start to insert large sprays of faux greenery I got at Hobby Lobby years ago. I have several of them and they are a really nice quality, with mossy pinecones attached. They are large and help fill up space. I just stick them in as needed and the branches of the tree help support them. Where necessary I can always twist one strand of greenery on the tree into a strand on the spray and that holds it tight.
I've picked up more large greenery sprays like this at a garage sale this year and I'm looking forward to using them on the 12' tree as well.
Lacking a good supply of the sprays, the other thing I've done is to use the branches from one of our extra Christmas trees that I'm not putting up. The trick with anything you are sticking in is to hide the ugly stick end in towards the trunk of the tree where it won't be seen once everything else goes on.
- Now that the "greenery" is all in place, I put the lights on. I'm now sold on the method of starting at the bottom and going up to the top and back down again, working my way around the tree in sections that way.
My personal preference is to do a layer of white lights first, deeper in towards the trunk, with a boat load of multi color lights around the whole outside of the tree where the lights will reflect off the ornaments.
- Then I connect the tree topper...carefully! I find it doesn't look right if I sit it on top of the tree using the little inverted cone that is always on toppers. So I wire it to the top most branch instead - usually using the extra long twist ties that wrap up lights when you get a new box. Then I arrange the greenery in such a way to hide the twist ties. But if I use a white twist tie on silver metal, you don't notice it really! You could also use metallic pipe cleaners, etc. so it blends in.
- Next, I start to stick in long glittery branches/sprays, some red, some gold, etc. somewhat evenly around the tree. They stick out a little but I stick them in so the end of the stick is going upwards and in towards the trunk so they lie nicely for the most part. I have a ton of these purchased at after season sales over the years and they help fill in gaps nicely.
The nice thing about these sprays is that even just one of them, discovered at a garage sale, will look amazing as part of a finished tree. Once you get all the ornaments, etc. on it doesn't seem out of place at all.
- Now it's time for the crazy amount of ornaments! I put on all the large over-sized ones first, mostly towards the bottom of the tree. These help to fill in any remaining gaps or uneven looking spots.
Then I put on all the rest of the ornaments, struggling to find room for them all by the end!
- Finally, I put on the garland! I've been tending to just do beaded garland for years now. My favorites are the 3-4 lengths of garland that are actually sprays of beads on fishing line, it just looks frothy and so beautiful when laid over the ornaments on the tree. Like icing on a cake!
I don't have too many of these so I just stagger them here and there on the front of the tree, as evenly distributed as possible.
Then I go round and round with silver and gold standard beaded garland, looping and looping.
If I were doing a ribbon or tulle garland I would do it at the end as well, I find it works better for me to work around the ornaments so that I can see where the garland needs to fall to not hide too much.
But I think others may put garland on before ornaments? I've always just done it last for a finishing touch.
DH really loves the shiny tinsel garland - reminds him of childhood trees I think - and I've used that in addition to the beaded garland in years past.