oh happy day!

merry christmas.....

boxwood chandelier

Boxwood greens for the chandelier, which, acoording to the Bigbee Brown's in Tasha Tudor's Corgiville Christmas, "do not shed needles into the teacups below, as spruce and balsam do..."

bottlebrush trees

I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to figure this one out...

Start with those cheapy trees that come in a bag of like 20 at the craft store...

Dunk them in a bleach/water combo. The more bleach you use the faster the color will be removed, but also the stinkier it will be. My first try I used a little bleach, maybe a couple of capfuls, and filled up the tiny side of my sink with water. It took about all day to get a white tree. The next try I dumped rather alot of bleach in there, and in about 5 minutes, I had white trees...

Then, voila! I was going to run out and get some RIT dye and get some nice vintagey colors going, but my car is currently stuck in my icy driveway... I think the white is rather nice! I added some glass glitter to one, a bit of tarnished tinsel to another. I'm going to bleach the whole bag of trees and have a white bottlebrush forest to accompany my not yet made glittery cardboard vintage-style village (maybe I'll get to that one next year!)

It would also be nice to pull off those plastic snow bases, and maybe use wooden discs at the bases for a more authentic look.

New Holiday Bears and Friends on ebay!