New Year's holidays are a magical time of year when you want to fill your home with a winter fairy tale by choosing original decorative accessories for it. Try creating your own decor from pine branches for the New Year.
This is better than buying ready-made Chinese products, since they are not only not of high quality, but also demonstrate a low level of safety for the health of household members.
How to make spruce branches with your own hands?
An original decor made of branches for the fireplace, front door, festive table, bedside tables, etc. will help to bring an atmosphere of celebration and fun into your home, fill it with comfort and New Year’s joy. This is a great opportunity to decorate your home, filling it with a festive atmosphere and warmth.
Artificial pine needles will be a salvation for home decor with allergy sufferers.
You can make pine or spruce branches yourself from scrap materials if you don’t want to go into the forest for real pine branches.
During the work process you need to prepare the following materials:
- sheets of colored paper with a density of 130-160 g/m2 in green and emerald colors;
- ordinary paper napkins;
- wire;
- white gouache;
- can of PVA glue;
- brush.
This set of available materials will allow you to create an unusual craft with your own hands to give your home a festive look for the New Year holiday.
At the initial stage of work, you need to prepare Christmas tree needles. To do this, cut the paper into strips 2 cm thick. After this, the strips need to be cut into thin fringes.
Ordinary gouache, which is used to tint the ends of the needles white, will help give the branches a snowy effect. The branch will have an even more natural appearance if the ends of its needles are greased with PVA glue and sprinkled with semolina or starch. This will create the effect of a snow-covered tree.
Next, you should wind the prepared strips of paper onto a wire base. Carry out this process carefully, do not rush, because the twig should turn out very similar to a natural pine branch.
On a note! For the splendor of the composition, the finished branch can be combined with other branches, also created by hand, or decorated with Christmas tree decorations, beads, and rhinestones.
Using small branches you can decorate a wrapped New Year's gift or a greeting card. A large composition, created with your own hands from artificial coniferous branches, will help decorate a festive table, fireplace, or children's room. If you wish and have enough free time, you can make a whole New Year’s tree that will preserve a piece of the soul of its author.
Making a paper Christmas tree step by step
How to decorate the Christmas tree: stylish toys, garlands, beads
The joy and anticipation of the holiday appears long before the chimes strike. Each stage of preparation is exciting in its own way, and creating a New Year’s outfit for the Christmas tree is especially exciting. Vanity and haste are not appropriate here, so it is important to take care of all the nuances in advance.
Depending on the style in which the beautiful spruce tree will appear, decorative elements are selected. She will be decorated with toys, colorful beads, or there will be enough garlands and tinsel. Whether to devote a few family evenings and make decorations, buy them at the Christmas tree market, or look for antique toys in the collection of your beloved grandmother. And what “little things” should not be overlooked so as not to anger the totem animal?
Toys
It is believed that the Ox especially values home comfort, the warmth of family relationships, and respect for nature and traditions. Which jewelry is best?
- New Year's balls made of fabric, cardboard, foam plastic, toys made of beads and beads will help to show creative talents
- Paper decorations will create an aura of lightness and tenderness
- Toys made from bulk materials (cereals, pasta) will be a symbol of inexhaustible supplies
- Souvenirs from family and friends will become a messenger of goodness, love, and mutual understanding
- Coins will attract finance to the house
- Crafts and sweets on the Christmas tree will speed up the addition to the family. Candies, homemade gingerbreads, cookies, fruits, dried fruits are suitable
- If you decorate the spruce with edible toys (tea balls, figured chocolate, lollipops), the year will pass in abundance and satiety.
To appease the totem animal of 2021, the Ox, there must be an image of him on the tree. For example, hand-sewn felt figures.
Note: Traditionally, toys were hung on the tree using threads, but now there is a more convenient option - special hooks in the color of spruce needles, which will neatly fit into the image of a forest guest.
Fairy lights
The range of garlands offered by manufacturers allows you to add the brightest, most unusual, and daring solutions to your interior. What makes garlands different?
Lamp type:
- Incandescent lamps. A cheaper, but energy-intensive option. The service life is shorter, but sometimes such garlands are successfully used in retro-style elements.
- LED lamps have a lot of advantages: long service life, durability, bright, rich light, energy savings, and the ability to be used outdoors.
Wire type:
- Rubber
- Silicone
- PVC is the most economical option, but cannot be used in cold temperatures, unlike the previous two types.
Power type:
- From the network
- Battery operated
Possibility of use:
- In room
- On the street
Design:
- Garlands-threads with mini-bulbs
- Garlands-grids
- "Light rain" with hanging threads
- Fringe - hanging threads have different lengths. When decorating rooms, it is usually hung on curtains.
- Duralight - a garland with flat or round LEDs inside a transparent cord
- Beltlight - with larger incandescent lamps inside a 2- and 5-core cord.
- Cliplight is a long cable with especially bright LEDs. Most often it decorates trees on the street.
You can make a festive garland with your own hands:
- a chain of paper rings is the simplest option, for which you will need colored paper, scissors, and glue. The same chain can be made from felt of different colors and fastened with a glue gun.
- a garland of paper strips will require strong threads, colored paper, a needle, and scissors. Along the entire length of the thread, strips are placed in a horizontal position and stitched in the center.
- if the house has a fireplace (real or decorative), a garland of socks would be a good solution. The materials for production are varied: colored paper, cardboard, textiles or felt. First draw stencils on a piece of paper. Then trace the silhouettes of the socks using stencils on the selected material. Using Moment glue or a gun, attach the garland elements to twine, ribbon or braid. Decorate the fireplace.
- A garland of light bulbs will become an original decor. Light bulbs of any shape will work. They can be painted in different colors, then dried on a specially prepared cardboard stand with holes. Drawings with acrylic paints, stamps, glued beads or sparkles are also suitable as decoration. The light bulbs are attached to the tinsel using glue.
Beads
During the holidays, in the New Year's decoration departments you can find Christmas tree beads of any design, color and size. Shimmering, sparkling, plastic, glass, wood beads. You can buy the beads you like, or you can make them yourself.
What can be made from branches?
Since childhood, the aroma of pine or spruce has been associated with the New Year, but today fewer and fewer people want to buy a whole tree for the holiday. And there are many reasons for this:
- Saving. Green spruce or pine is a rather expensive pleasure, which not every family can pay for.
- Place. Not everyone has spacious apartments to mount a huge Christmas tree.
- Time. Selecting, buying, bringing and installing a New Year's beauty in your home requires a lot of time, which not everyone has.
Have you ever decorated a house like this?
Not really
Instead of a whole tree, you can use artificial or natural branches, decorated with your own hands in New Year's style. This decor will allow you to bring a winter fairy tale and a festive atmosphere into your home.
Crafts made from pine needles come in a wide variety of varieties:
- Coniferous wreaths. They are pine or spruce branches, carefully laid out in the shape of a round wreath with additional decor in the form of New Year's toys, pine cones decorated with sparkles, wooden pendants, beads, ribbons, etc. Such products will help decorate the front door both outside and inside the house.
- Compositions of coniferous branches with candles. The principle of operation and methods of decoration in this case are similar to the technique of creating a wreath, but the branches of pine needles are laid out in any shape, and not in the shape of a circle. A candlestick with candles in the New Year style is placed in the center of the composition;
- A DIY Christmas tree made from branches: Christmas tree decorations, nuts, candies - all this can be used to decorate a homemade beauty. To make such a craft, you need a base in the form of a strong stick with a stable base, onto which individual coniferous branches are fixed. As a result, the finished tree looks so natural that it is difficult to distinguish it from a real tree.
On a note! The decor of a composition made of pine needles can be very diverse. Absolutely everything that is present in the needlewoman’s arsenal is suitable: beads, ribbons, rhinestones, whole and broken Christmas tree decorations, pendants, brooches, ribbons and much more.
How to decorate a Christmas tree to attract good luck in the year of the Ox
The process of decorating the Christmas tree must be approached creatively and with pleasure. Then it will not be difficult to appease the totem animal of 2021 and attract good luck and prosperity into your life. There are three ways to arrange the decor on the Christmas tree:
- In a circle, from big to small. Start from the bottom, with the largest balls, move towards the top - the smallest balls should hang on it. Garlands are also hung in a circle.
- Based on the spiral principle. Garlands are located from top to bottom, with toys between them, preferably of the same size and color scheme.
- Vertical is the traditional method of decorating from top to bottom.
House decor made from branches for the New Year
If you have bought a Christmas tree, but the festive mood has not settled in the house, you can complement it with positive New Year's ikebana.
Ikebana is an alternative to a bulky Christmas tree that has nowhere to put.
After all, not all people install natural wood, preferring a more affordable artificial product.
What about the aroma of natural pine? A New Year's decorative craft made from natural branches will help fill your home with the unique aroma of a coniferous forest.
Decor made from pine needles will enliven the space of the house, breathing into it joyful notes in anticipation of a magical holiday. Such New Year's ikebana can be made with your own hands from spruce or pine branches, pine cones, New Year's balls and festive tinsel. Use a beautiful bottle, basket, felt boots, or felt boots as the basis for such a product.
You can complement the New Year's composition with red apples, tangerines, whole walnuts, honey and gingerbread. A composition of pine needles, star anise and cinnamon sticks will help create a unique aroma.
You can decorate different areas of the house with these crafts:
- decorate the surface of the fireplace with them;
- festive table;
- staircase railing to the second floor;
- front door;
- sideboard, racks, shelves.
On a note! A floral sponge will help extend the life of an ikebana made from living pine branches. Crafts made from artificial twigs have no expiration date.
Master class: assembling a frame for a bouquet of fresh flowers
The frame makes the bouquet unusual and looks much more interesting than usual. Below we will show how to make such a frame for flowers.
To work you will need:
- Scissors
- Secateurs
- Knife
- Wire
- Thermal gun
- Double sided tape
- Glue for fresh flowers
- Cardboard
- Decorative foliage
- Beads
- Rope
Let's start tinkering.
Cut out two identical circles from cardboard. We glue the wire to one of them using a heat gun. This will be the frame mount. Next, we glue the second circle on top of the wire, thereby covering it. The base of the frame is ready. If desired, you can wrap the wire with tape.
Let's start decorating the base. To do this you will need several types of decorative greenery. We attach the leaves overlapping with double-sided tape on both sides of the frame to cover the cardboard. The frame is ready. All that remains is to decorate it.
We make jewelry of different sizes from rope and decorate it with beads. We glue them to the frame using glue for fresh flowers.
Next, we insert a beautiful bouquet, which can be either ready-made or assembled yourself. To make the bouquet stem look neat, you can make a handle from a satin ribbon and secure it with pins.
