I'm so behind on decorating this year, I even thought about skipping out all together, but who am I kidding I could never do that. So in true Kaitlin fashion I threw together some DIYs and transformed my fall decor into Christmas. I love a good day spent DIYIng, I looked on Pinterest to see what stood out to me, I always look around of inspiration, magazines, Pinterest, and Instagram are some of my favorites to draw ideas from. Keep in mind when you are looking around for inspiration, that it is just that inspiration there's a good chance you won't be able to recreate someone's idea exactly like they have, but you can take their picture and make it your own.
Before we get started on the decor I want to share a helpful tip. If you go to your local home improvement store they will GIVE you for FREE their Christmas tree clippings.... It truly is a Diyers dream! There is so much you can use these clippings for, and I'm going to share with you a few ways I used them!
I've known since September that I wanted to make Christmas Trees to put in the urns on either side of my door. So I started there.
The things I used for these are:
A tomato cage 33in ($1.98 at my local lowes)
3 15 inch garlands ($1.00 at dollar tree)
1 pipe cleaner.
First you want to tie the top of the tomato cage together with the pipe cleaner.
From there it's pretty simple, twist one piece of the garland around the cage and wrap, continue for the other 2 garlands as well.
Once your done your tree should look something like this, I left the bottom of mine unwrapped, because I'm going to be filling that space in with some of those Christmas tree clippings I mentioned before.
NEXT, I wanted to make some wreath type hangers for my lights on either side of my door.
The materials I used for these are:
2 metal hangers straight out of my closet, I HATE metal hangers in my closet, but boy do they come in handy for projects like this. (Free)
2 floral styrofoam pieces ($1 at dollar tree)
Red Ornaments, I used a mix of some I had already and a pack from dollar tree ($1)
And last but not least some of those free tree clippings
I started out buy laying the floral foam out and arrange the branches how I'd like them to look on there. Then I went in with my hot glue gun and glued the pieces down. Once those were on I did the same thing with the ornaments.
I bent the hangers so that it would be long enough to hang from the light post, and skinny enough to stick in the styrofoam like so.
I knew that I wanted a old looking gold metal bucket, you know the ones with the holes in them? Couldn't find one local anywhere, so I made one my self I took a pink basket that I got from..... You guessed it DOLLAR TREE ($1) and a can of gold spray paint (I keep gold spray paint on hand because I'm ALWAYS using it) voila my vision came to life....
I wanted to add, pinecones to the basket to give it a "rustic wintery feel" My yard is full of pine trees so I decided to take the blessing mother nature was giving me for free, and collected a BUNCH of pinecones straight from the ground. (If you don't have pinecones laying around you can buy them in bags at most stores.
I wanted to give the illusion of snow..... Not very believable here in SC but there's something about snow covered pinecones that I find beautiful and they are great for the winter time.
There is a number of ways to give your pinecones the look of snow.
1. Is using the actual fake snow out of the can....
2. Is using white paint and a sponge and dabbing the paint on them
Either way that you choose will work!
to add the final touch, I bought some brown wrapping paper (shipping paper) from dollar tree. I wrapped some boxes added ribbon and voila all done!
