Christmas Garland with Housing Units

HELLO DECEMBER!

Hope your Christmas is all ablaze with love and sparkle. I want to speak to you all about a lovely project I have recently done with Housing Units. For those of you who don't know about them, they are based in North Manchester and have a massive interiors emporium so if you have time to have a good old wander about swing by! If you don't live close by they also have an online page where you can order! Perfect for everyone!

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I was invited to their Christmas launch (Blog here) and I was so utterly impressed and surprised by their products that I wanted to create an epic garland for the front door. We were so so pleased with our brand spanking new front door in its bright yellow that I wanted to create something pretty wow to frame it and really make a grand welcome for all our guests over the Christmas season. Did I mention we are hosting a Fake Christmas Dinner for 16 this weekend?!!! Anyway - slow, deep breaths required! Back to the garland, so above here is a little snap of the door pre-chrismassification (yes that is a word). So to create the garland this is what I did! I also created a stories collection (aka Highlight) on my Instagram so if you prefer a video then head here.

1. Measure! I measured up the door across the top and down the sides, I was shocked to discover that to get a garland most of the way round I needed around 18ft of base garland!!
2. Take a trip to Housing Units and spend a few hours perusing their gorgeous Christmas decoration section and nail down what kind of detail you want to go for. I am a classic kind of boy when it comes to Christmas so I am all about the green, red and gold! Oooh and lights!! SO important to have lights! Obviously December is the darkest month of the year so add a bit of sparkle with fairy lights.
3. Plan your garland. So when the delivered box arrived, I squealed with glee and anticipation for the actual construction, but I must say I had not been 100% sure how to construct it. My rough plan was green, lots of berries and some gold with sparkle and lights. I wanted a balanced look through the garland so make sure to get enough to spread across.... I didn't so Ill tell you what I did.

    4. Lay out the main garland on the floor (didn't have enough table space for 18 ft!) and tie it up at the centre (the garlands have metal wire at the end that  you can just loop around each other). Also open up all the flattened branches so give it as much volume as possible.
   5.  Attach the lights! I used these cluster lights that are really smart as they go on for 8 hrs and off for 16 hrs automatically! isn't that genius! Also I chose a cluster light as it has more LED bulbs per length than traditional fairy lights and this will give more of a glow when lit. I think its really important to put the lights on before any decoration as the last thing you want to see is the black wire above your pretty decorations. The way I attached them was basically just winding the lights around the garland, and also using the branches as stays (they have wire in them)
  

 6. I then laid the berry garlands on top of the green and  tried to make sure they are as centred as possible, so if you have any lengths of bare green garland, these are at the edges and equal in length (Approximately). I then attached the berries to the main garland again winding the branches around each other to get them to stay how I wanted and I also kept the lights on at this stage so that I can appreciate where the lights were in relation to the foliage and berries, also it looked pretty and motivated me!
  7. Next step was applying the sparkle, as I didn't have enough length of the gold sparkle fronds (not sure if that is the correct term to describe them) I took each one apart by unwrapping the ribbon around the wire frame and basically pulling each separate frond apart, this left me with two piles of different sized fronds (and a lot of glitter). I then went around fitting the individual sparkly fronds onto the garland in a relatively balanced way. Again each one has a metal wire backbone so relatively easy to wind around and attach to the garland. This created a really bespoke and expensive looking garland for a fraction of the cost!
  8. Hang it! So this all depends on what type of house you have but we have crazy hard bricks in this house so a while with my percussion drill and some heavy duty screw eyes gave me the sturdy base to hang the garland off with some extra wire. Plug it in and enjoy the visual feast! Et Voila! you are done!

As always pleas let me know what you think and comment below! xoxo