Decorating my flat for Christmas

Decorating my flat for Christmas was a bit of trial and error. I resolved to do something more interesting than my normal effort of sticking a tree up and lining up cards on the bookcase. My efforts were largely successful but not entirely. I guess this year was the experiment and next year hopefully I will get it right. Or more right anyway.

In early December I attended Abigail Ahern’s Christmas Masterclass and this gave me a good grounding in how to decorate your house from nature. I came away with some great ideas to try at home and as with anything, if you don’t practice them immediately you soon forget them.

So here is what I did, what worked and what didn’t, and what I’ll do differently next time.

The Tree

Annoyingly we bought our tree before I attended Abigail’s class (my fault entirely). We bought a seven footer which was very lovely but nothing out of the ordinary I suppose.  Basically I just shoved a load of baubles on it and I now think it looks a bit boring and unimaginative.

I tend to favour the over-adornment route, I like trees that look like Santa threw up on them. But that is hard to achieve with a large tree because no matter how many baubles you buy, there are never enough and I have the additional problem of where to store the baubles for the other 48 weeks of the year.

I think next year I will get a smaller tree and mount it on a table or stool. I think these look stylish and a bit unexpected. Abigail has a few medium sized table-top trees in her house rather than one large tree and I’ve come round to this way of thinking. Not least because our ridiculously large sofa has somewhat taken over the living room.

The nicest tree I’ve seen this year was in the home of interior designer Francis Sultana. He had a small tree which he elevated onto a small table and decorated solely in Fortnum & Mason baubles. So if anyone would like to buy me a treeful of these for Christmas next year that would be very nice, thank you very much.

{image from House & Garden}

The wreath

I made this in Abigail’s class and it turned out surprisingly well (as long as you don’t look at it too closely). It’s a real wreath with fake berries and nut-things (no idea what those are) from Abigail’s shop, plus real eucalyptus, rosemary, oranges, plums and pine cones, all of which are attached with floristry wire. The wreath has lasted really well, I changed the oranges and plums after a couple of weeks but otherwise it’s as it was when I made it on the 8th December.

The garland

I bought a sackful of foliage and flowers from Covent Garden Market the week before Christmas and used most of it to make a large garland for the fireplace. I bought a ready-made six foot garland for around £30. Next time I’d get eight foot so that it draped over the ends better. I then poked loads of foliage and flowers into it, working out from the centre.

The main problem with the garland was that much o f it didn’t last very long. The zinnia, berried ivy and banksia are still doing amazingly well so I will definitely use those again, but the eucalyptus and rosemary went crispy quickly.  Partly this is because none of it is in water, and partly because it was over a hot fireplace.

I thought I’d bought way too much foliage but it was the perfect amount. I kept the unused half on the balcony in water and used it to replenish the garland on Christmas Eve and that worked pretty well. Ten minutes effort and it looked like new again. Apparently I should have soaked the garland in the bath for a while before using it to ensure it drank as much water as possible before roasting it over the gas fire but nobody told me that.

The vases

I put the rest of the flowers and foliage in vases and these are all still going strong. I chose roses, thistles and zinnia for the flowers – I really likes the colour scheme. Some of the bouquets are a mixture of fake and real bits and this for me is the killer tip I learnt from the masterclass. It means that you can create long lasting bouquets using fake flowers for the drama and bunches of foliage to pad them out–foliage is cheap, aromatic and long lasting. And you really can’t tell the difference with the fake stuff, to the extent I know I have some fake berried ivy in one of them but I can’t actually work out which bit it is. I’m going to have to eat it to find out.

The other tip I loved is to cover glass vases with bark. Abigail has now turned me against clear, glass vases, which is kind of annoying as I used to like them but I now I hate seeing the flower stems.  She has magical brainwashing witchy powers I’m sure and now I just think of Kelly Hoppen and the 90s when I see vases of lillies.

I bought a pile of bark from Covent Garden for three quid and wrapped them around the vases, tied them with a bit of string and added a gold heart and that was that. Habitat do some brilliantly cheap vases (£1.40 if you can believe that) which are perfect. I wanted the small ones but they’d sold out annoyingly which is why mine are a bit too tall and I had to add an extra bit of bark to the top.

And then I added a little vignette to the bottom of the vase to ground it. I used pine cones and my lovely Niki Jones tea light holders, plus a pile of super-cheap glass tealights, also from Habitat (£1.50 for a pack of six!).

Oh and the gurgling fish jug got in on the action too.

The table

In an ideal world I’d have two oversized glass candlestick holders from Abigail’s shop but we made do with two smaller ones from Graham and Green which were a tenth of the price (£7.95 as opposed to £75). They are useful and nice but lack the drama I was coveting. They are great for a cheap fix though.

I was going to make centrepieces but the holders were too small really so I just used red candles and scattered the table with tea lights and pine cones. I headed the table with flowers at one end and my awesome reindeer that my lovely friend Sam gave me at the other.

And then a few bowls of pinecones (which were a fiver for a huge bag) interspersed with tealights and I was done.