How to Decorate Your Christmas Tree: Part 2
Part 2 in a 5-part series about how to decorate your Christmas tree.
How to decorate your Christmas tree
Hide bare spots with large ornaments
Once you have your lights, flowers, floral picks and bows up it’s time to hide bare spots with your largest ornaments.
There will always be bare spots on a tree: Either because that’s the way the branches are, or because there aren’t enough lights in an area and it causes a kind of black hole.
I like to cover these spots up with gigantic ball ornaments first. I have 9 or 10 really big red and gold ones, and I tie them on with wide gold ribbon. (Ribbon that I saved from gifts, by the way! Totally free to me. And pretty, too!)
After I get those up in the barest spots, we start putting up all most of the ornaments that aren’t balls. I haven’t got a ton of pictures of these for this post, but we have quite the collection of non-ball-shaped ornaments. We have a set of gold snowflakes, lots of horns, gold treble clefs and eighth notes (remember my musical theme), stars, red jewels, gold icicles, and various others.
Here is the tree about halfway through this process:
I usually start with the biggest ones first (like the gold stars with the red beads) to continue hiding any bare spots. After getting those up, we go with the ones that we have a lot of (like the snowflakes, icicles, and jewels) because it’s easier to make sure they are spread out somewhat evenly that way.
However, you don’t want your tree to look like you have everything perfectly set. It does need to look random, even while not having two identical ornaments next to each other. Just eyeball it and you’ll do fine.
The girls’ favorite ornaments are the horns. They just can’t wait until it’s time for them to go up every year—somewhere between the snowflakes and the icicles. I would recommend not hanging them on the lights as you see here, though. I’m guessing my youngest (5 years old at the time of this tutorial) did that.
I’m sorry this post seems a little short…Photoshop sort of quit working on me and I don’t have a ton of time tonight anyway. But I wanted to post because I’m notorious for starting something like this and not finishing, so this is my feeble attempt at keeping the ball (ornaments) rolling. Look for the next post tomorrow!
Happy Monday! (And even happier tree decorating!)
Click here for Part 3: Adding ball ornaments
I think I need to resign myself to the fact that I will never have as fabulous of a Christmas tree as yours, but I think I can take some of your suggestions and make some major improvements into our tree for next year! Decorating a tree is a really overwhelming experience for me, but I just put stuff on that makes me happy and it works well enough. Thanks for the step-by-steps, it's good to see the process of someone who actually knows what they're doing!
Gorgeous! I also use gold and red on my tree – so I am taking in all of the steps you take to making your tree look fabulous.
I LOVE your trees! You really have quite the talent for beautification. And this came at the perfect time because I am swimming in a sea of ornament boxes with nary a hint of one on my tree.