The little Salvation Army tree had definitely seen some better days, and was looking a little sad. Back in my event planning days, scraggly trees were "filled in" with cuttings from other evergreens, so I decided to grab some evergreen garland while still in the store.
Of course, when I was grabbing the garland, I saw several old Christmas floral arrangements and floral candle rings and grabbed those, too. I was especially excited to find four huge bunches of poinsettias for a quarter each!
Next, I grabbed some 50% off LED lights at a local drug store (probably won't buy those again-- they just don't have "sparkle"). Then I hit a fabric and craft outlet to find some paint and burlap.
The strapping was cut into pieces about ten inches long, and tucked into the fully decorated tree to look as if it wound in and out of the boughs. Another great find at the outlet was this funky plastic spanish moss.
It was on Halloween clearance, so it was pretty steeply discounted! It worked beautifully on the little tree winding and trailing, adding contrast of texture and color.
The most time consuming part of the project was deconstructing the floral arrangements and candle rings and reinventing them into evergreen sprays, using the evergreen garland I had picked up. After lots of cutting apart and rewiring, I had a small mountain of evergreen sprays! Each spray consisted of two lengths of wired evergreen garland, one poinsettia, a small spray of assorted greenery, and something "else", such as a silk rose or a little pine cone or a little piece of fruit--just using what was available from the scavenged arrangements.
The poinsettias were a little too "red", so they were painted with burgundy paint before being added to the evergreen sprays. When all of the sprays were finished they were dry-brushed with white paint to look as if they were "snow-dusted". All in all, I think our little tree turned out pretty well!
