Happy Mundane Holidays! How is this year ending already?! On the one hand, personally, this year SUCKED for me. Like, pretty much the worst. So on that end, good riddance. But on the other hand, time has flown by so fast!! It’s… scary! But the good thing about the holiday break is that it offers us a minute to stop and reflect. For me, it’s all about my “holiday healing” and with the year I’ve had, I’m especially looking forward to doing a lot of that this year!
For this year’s annual ornament adventure, I first had the weird idea that I really wanted to do something with red and pink. I’m also always inspired by Post Modern and Memphis-Milano design, so I wanted to incorporate a little of that optimistic aesthetic to help set the tone for the new year.
To start, the first thing I did was decide that the tree should be red, and let the ornaments be pink. Now, I looked around for an existing red tree, but I really didn’t want a sparkly tree this year. Last year’s obnoxious extravaganza gave me my glitter fill for awhile, so I wanted the red to be very matte. Finding a matte red tree was not so simple, so since I had successfully sprayed my tree last year, I figured making one red would be just as simple. I started by getting an inexpensive pre-lit artificial white tree, then covered the lights with painters tape. All 150 of them. (Ugh.)
If you’re thinking about painting a Christmas tree, here are a few tips I’ve learned:
- Tape off your lights with them on. It makes it so much easier to spot where they are!
- Buy more spray paint than you think. When you use spray paint, the paint only covers any surfaces that are exposed. The bristles of a normal artificial tree are all interlapping and touching. When you do your first coat, it may appear everything is covered, but the second any bristle moves out of place, you’ll expose the area underneath that wasn’t originally exposed. So, you’ll end up needing to do several coats, moving the branches around a little each time and let it dry. This tree was 4ft and I used up 4 cans of paint, and could have/should have used at least one more!
- Wear gloves.
I thought the tree turned out pretty good, (despite a few white bits that continue to show up as things get moved 😤😡) But anywayzzz… onto the ornaments!
I’ve used foam blocks quite a few times for ornaments in the past. They’re just really easy to work with, and I like that they’re very lightweight too. I wanted to make some simple geometric shapes so I figured using some foam craft sheets would do the trick nicely. I then painted them with some acrylic craft paint. Normally I’d use my favorite, spray paint, but I couldn’t find the right shade of pink, so an inexpensive acrylic paint was the next solution. I drew a few template shapes out of scrap paper and then used a craft knife/x-acto to cut them out.
I added some hot pink patterns to a few of the painted ornaments, using a simple stencil I made from scrap pieces of the foam, glued to some cardboard.
For the rest of the ornaments, I just spray painted some bulb ornaments with a hot pink color, and then brought back some of the black foam block ornaments I used from my 2015 tree. I painted over a few of the foam block ornaments the same pink to balance things out. And that was that for my 2018 ornament adventure!
For my gift wrapping situation, I still had a roll of the cobalt blue paper from 2015. I bought a fresh roll of pink paper to add to the mix, and just used some washi tape in creative ways to dress the rest of the packages up. The red boxes were leftover from last year, and I got those at the 99 cent store.
Finally, for my dining table tablescape, I kept things pretty simple. I used this blue totem vase from West Elm I picked up over the summer, a pink round vase from Ikea, and added a (fake) red anthurium and hot pink candle to keep things modern, but still festive.
And that’s what’s going on for Happy Mundane Holidays 2018 over here! I hope all of you have a safe, warm, and wonderful holiday. I’m really looking forward to new mundane musings for 2019, and just want to thank you for sticking with me and this lil blog o’ mine. Don’t forget to check me over on insta for more shennanigans!