Friday, November 23, 2012

A vintage start to Christmas decorating


I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving! I've been feeling a little under the weather all week, but other than that our holiday was perfect. Our little family of three traveled across town to celebrate with my husband's family at his sister's home, and as always it was a large and noisy group. My daughter was home for the week, but had to go back to school on Friday due to her work schedule, and by Friday afternoon I had the Christmas decorating bug so I decided to set up a little Christmas tree in my "Mom cave."

I had done some after-Christmas shopping last year and acquired a nice little collection of vintage ornaments,  with a vision in my head of doing some sort of "shabby" tree. I had a brain-fart, though, and bought a three-foot green tree (instead of white) which was super-cheap at the time but not quite what I wanted. Around that time I test-sprayed some fake garland to see if painting my green tree might be an improvement, but decided it would not. So I've known all year that my little office tree would have to be green instead of white. 

 It's impossible for me to take a good picture of a decorated Christmas tree and have it look as pretty as the tree looks in person - but, pictures of individual ornaments always come out pretty good. So, here is my little Mom-cave tree - covered with vintage ornaments but not as "shabby" as I originally intended. (I'm thinking of tying hand-torn muslin "ribbons" on some of the branches - wonder what they would look like?) 

My vintage finds included a small selection of old "Shiny Brites" - the classic ornaments we remember as kids...
I also found a box of small "textured" ornaments, some a pretty rose-red and others a soft white:
I just love little "Goldie" back there, she's only about an inch in diameter. I purposely put her toward the back so she'd be a pretty reward for stepping up to take a closer look. 
I also found a set of four of these large ornaments painted with violets - not vintage, but I fell in love with the violets. I had some hand-crocheted snowflakes in a stash from my mother-in-law's estate. 
Here's another crocheted snowflake, with a large peach-hued textured ornament in the background. 
Found a set of twelve of these spun-glass hearts in a thrift store - they really glimmer in-amongst the lights! 
For the topper, I pulled the floral decoration from my mail tin, and used three little angels from the crochet stash. VERY shabby-sweet, no?
Next-day update: This pretty three-tiered eyelet skirt sure shabs it up! Found this at the Goodwill today - it's not really a tree skirt. In fact I'm not sure what it is - maybe a bassinet liner... maybe an infant car seat cover. Anyway at $2.59 it was certainly all mine - all that beautiful eyelet! 

I'm not sure when our tree will go up in living room. My daughter tells me she would like to help, but she doesn't come home for Winter Break until mid-December. I'm not sure I can wait that long! How's your Christmas decorating coming along - have you started yet?
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