New Ideas for Christmas Decorating

In an ideal world, this is what I would like my room and table to look like this year. The picture is from the new Sarah Raven catalogue (the link is to the house things page), full of beautiful things which I can only take inspiration from, rather than buy. I do have alliums in the garden, so have plans next year to spray paint them silver, and I have a couple of glass tea-light holders, so I might make a start. For a long time now we've had very traditional red and green as our colour scheme, but I liked the bright jewel colours here mixed with the silver and fresh green foliage.

So having seen that picture, I was all ready to attempt aspects of it as I decorated for our church advent meal this evening. We try and make the long run of tables look as pretty as possible for not too much money, so following success last time with free ivy and cheap curling ribbon in red and gold, I waded about in the garden this morning collecting longish lengths of ivy, as did my friend, and we got quite a lot of nice variegated leaves, and here are my ribbons and baubles for this year:

All you do is lay the pieces of ivy end to end in the middle of the table, alternating the way they naturally want to arch if they do, then where they meet tie them together with great long lengths of curling ribbon, threading it through baubles if you have them, curl the ends, and drape the curly bits through the leaves, or across the table.



It's a very simple but effective way of making the tables look attractive- you don't even need baubles really, but they do add a bit of extra sparkle. It did take a while because we had lots of tables, but it will look good when people walk in, and we scattered some tea-lights around too, so it should be welcoming. Shame we couldn't splash out on colour-coordinated chairs and plates too!

Perhaps silver sprayed allium heads next year...