Last Attempt at Flowers

Right, the summer is nearly over. As usual I find it hard to accept that. I am fighting it tooth and nail. And just to spite the outdoors which is now beginning to deprive me of fresh flowers, I am bringing the flowers inside.

It all started here. One of those flower garlands. One of my nieces had played a little bit to roughly with it and the string broke. So I decided to take the whole thing apart and use it differently. After all, poor Claus (the rocking horse) was beginning to feel a bit confused, sporting a pink flower garland, anyway...


Essentially I picked the whole thing apart. You are left then with pieces of flimsy fabric, cut into a vague flower shape. I simply just stuck these shapes onto the branches in my vase. The hole in the middle where the string had run through, was handy for pushing the flowers onto the branches. And now the branches have miraculously flowered in mid-September, much to the surprise of my niece.

Yes, it is Tack City. But I like a bit of colour every once in a while. And for a free and easy bit of decoration this was actually fun...

There are a few bits of fabric flowers left over on the string. I already have a cunning idea up my sleeve how that could be used up. Stay tuned...

Best,

Best Buy

Never in a million years would I have thought that this was going to be one of my favouritest most favourite deco buys of all time - a fake Christmas garland. I bought this, I remember it well, on the 23rd of December 2006 for about 20.00 Euro. And boy did I have a guilty conscience about this.

And why would anyone in their right mind get their moral knickers in a twist over a Christmas garland? Because it is artificial. *hisssss* Oh, that does not sit well with me. I love my real fir in the house for Christmas. But I have to say that the artificial garland is absolutely fabulous.

Sure, the closer you get, the more artificial it looks. But it comes out of the bag every year, virtually undamaged despite having been squished into the attic and having endured two months in close proximity to the fire.

As you can see above, I have wound some ordinary and cheap Christmas lights around the garland. I don't even bother taking them off when I put the garland  back in storage in January. The little bulbs are resilient and look really cute when switched on. Heck, they even look nice when switched off (see right).

While the garland goes up in the same spot every year - namely the drawing room mantlepiece - I tend to decorate differently every year. Last year, as you can see in the image above, there were just the Christmas lights on it. This year, I decided to go a bit more blingy and added some big sparkly stars.

Best thing about the artificial garland: I can go on Christmas holiday on Wednesday and return the following week, not worrying about a heap of needles on the floor that needs brushing up upon return.
Hooray for plastic trees!

Best,

Material of the Week - Security Envelopes - Project 3

I had set myself the guideline of writing at least 3 posts with the current material of the week. But then I didn't get to update the blog as often as I thought this week. So here is a quick last suggestion what to do with the security envelopes.





I punched out loads of paper circles with my new toy, the 1-inch-punch. Then I made a simple garland of paper circles by sewing them together with the sewing machine. That was great fun, by the way. You just "feed" the circles under the needle and the machine does the rest. Quite a restful project - I could have gone on for hours - but ran out of circles.





I think I will hang the garland at our tall drawing room window. They will sway nicely in the draft from the windows. Or they could be a nice decoration for a birthday present.