dining room

A Tree for Every Room: Gilded Dining Room Tree

In The Studio

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Last year I had a goal to really do up the house for Christmas, including (as the title suggests) a decorated tree for each room. Between a convention in Mississippi in the middle the month and sheer end of the year exhaustion, it didn’t happen. I got 2 trees decorated and Todd put the lights on the big tree on the landing, but that’s as far as I got.

I did, however, order supplies for the dining room tree, so I was set to get started this year! Over on the Helmar blog I have step-by-step instructions of how I made the kitchen-themed garland for the centerpiece of my tablescape. Here’s the rest of the story, as it were.

I started with a simple artificial tree from Big Lots. It was the right size, but it was green, and the picture in my head was of a white and gold scene. So I used a tip from Jen over at EPBOT to flock our tree with spackling. Only thing was, all the spackle we could find was the heavier stuff, but there was spray spackle on the shelf and we decided to give that a shot. It worked perfectly and didn’t even take a full bottle to cover the little tree. If I find the second tree we bought (but is currently buried in the Christmas closet) it will be no problem to do it up as well.

Once flocked and the garland made, it was time to add a few more items. I didn’t want to overwhelm the tiny tree, so I added a single strand of white LED lights and a strand of small pearls to balance the heavier wood and gold garland. And it’s the dining room, it’s okay to dress up!

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Finally, I made some ornaments from a set of metal chocolate molds. I used an awl to punch small holes in the top and bottom of each mold and wired a loop at the top with gold wire to attach a hook. From the bottom hangs a large faux pearl.

I still need more to really fill out the tablescape–one tree isn’t going to cut it–but for now this is a really good start. I love seeing the tree on our dining room table when I walk through the room and I’m really excited to go get our big tree for upstairs this weekend!

 

What a Tangled Web We Weave…

Everyday Adventures

This post is part of an ongoing promotion with Oriental Trading Company. All opinions and photos, below, are my own.

Simple Halloween Dining Room

View from the back hall doorway into the dining room

How much am I loving our decorated dining room? A lot!

Though I think I may add something to the drapes… maybe a large black bow over each? I’ll have to give it some thought.

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Can you spot some lurking Halloween monkeys?

The hanging spider decoration from Oriental Trading Company didn’t look like much in the package, but is pretty impressive when opened up! Thanks to our 10′ ceilings not even our tallest guests will have to worry about plastic spiders skittering through their hair, but I love the way it peeks through the view from the door and throws shadows onto the wall behind it.

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Some of the wall decals made their way into the dining room, as well.

I’ve given up any effort to make the dining room symmetrical. The room is about 14′ square, with the chandelier in the center of the ceiling. Yet, if we were to center the table under it, said table would block the path between the library and the kitchen. (Granted, the kitchen wasn’t added on until later, so it wasn’t a big consideration at the beginning.) On the other hand, we could line the table up with the fireplace, but then there wouldn’t be room for anyone to actually access the far side of the table.

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The tall “picture” there is actually a dish towel from Kohl’s draped over a canvas board. It added some nice height to our alchemist’s mantel.

Since nothing else lines up in the room, it seemed less prudent to go through the trouble of moving the 8′ table to be able to center the spiders over it, so we opted for placing it over the walkway and I think I actually like it more!

I keep the table decorations simple, both because we do use the dining room for 99% of our evening meals and because in another week or so it’ll be covered completely by serving dishes for our Halloween party. There’s so much food at our parties that tablescaping is wasted effort!

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Meanwhile, the living room presented me with 3 blank walls and a hesitancy to actually hang things on them since I’m not certain that it wouldn’t make the plaster fail faster! So I needed a way to add some sort of interest in a quick and simple way.

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Cue more creepy cloth (aka freaky fabric, aka spooky cloth… depends on the store you find it at)! I drapes sheets of it over the drapes in the bay window and then had Todd help me by attaching small brads to the picture rail that rings the room and swagging the cloth between them.

Our mantle is partially hidden by the television (one day it will be mounted on the wall, once it’s been shored up enough to securely hold it!) so it’s a simple assemblage of skull candlesticks, pumpkin candles that I refuse to burn because I may never find the cuties again, and a glittery house silhouette.

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Finally, over one of our sofas, we arranged a mix of wall decals to create a small scene over the chair rail. The witch, cauldron, and a good but of the bats came from the Oriental Trading Company wall decal pack, mixed in with the Tree and bat decals we purchased from Lowe’s last year.

And, of course, the monkeys decided to hand out on the sofa-back as well.

I’d like to give one more thank you to Oriental Trading Company for the opportunity to incorporate some of their new Halloween products in our home, this year! We’ve certainly had a lot of fun putting them into play and  hope our guests appreciate them at the party next weekend. There’s still a couple more days left in their sweepstakes, so don’t forget to head over and enter!

Of course, I’ve got plenty more Halloween fun to share over the next couple weeks, so I hope you’ll come back next week to see what’s next!