Christmas Bling

All this chic snowflake decorating is all very well, but at Christmas you definitely need a bit of bling: lots of warm rich colours and sparkly stuff to brighten the place up a bit.

With this in mind, I've decorated the second window in our kitchen (the first has a curtain of paper snowflakes) with strings of red and gold circles:

Please excuse the terribly grainy photos of these - it really is incredibly dark here at the moment, which is probably why I'm lusting after shiny sparkly decorations...

I originally just had my cardboard Christmas Star hanging in this window, but it looked a little lonely so I decided to make garlands to match it.

 

I raided our recycling box for lots of empty cardboard boxes (cereal boxes, etc) and cut out lots of circles in different sizes, and then decorated them with red yarn, felt, chocolate coin foil, and an assortment of red and gold christmas wrap - lots of lovely shiny pieces saved from previous years (I am a hoarder, I admit it, but this this is a great project for using up all those small offcuts of giftwrap you get left with after wrapping your presents).

As you can see, I cut out an inner circle from some of the circles to make ring shapes - some of these I glued paper onto both sides, but others I wrapped with red yarn as if making a very skinny pompom: it takes a little while but I really like the effect and I think the yarn makes a great contrast against the super-shiny paper and foil. Felt circles have a similar soft, textured effect.

 

Once I'd made lots of circles, I laid them all out on our kitchen table to arrange them into garlands so I got a nice mix of shapes and colours, and then started putting the strings together.

 

Each garland starts with a bauble at the bottom for a bit of weight (I bought my red and sparkly gold ones from a charity shop, cheap as chips) and then each circle or ring is tied on to the yarn with about an inch gap left between them. I punched holes in most of the circles to do this (using an ordinary holepunch) but used a darning needle to get the yarn through the felt ones.

 

Then I hung them like the snowflake garlands, from the curtain hooks left by our old curtains - you could hang them from a string or use drawing pins to hold them in place, or maybe make a festive mobile from short strands. They spin really nicely and I'm already thinking about ways to adapt this project to spread some bauble bling to other parts of my house...

 

Please feel free to borrow photos if you want to blog about this project, but remember to credit me and link back to the original source, and do not reproduce my entire tutorial on your site. Thanks!
 
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