I decorated for Christmas with garden materials and second hand finds

This year I've challenged myself to decorate my living room for Christmas, but with one condition. I would either use things I already had, or I would craft them from scratch, from the free natural materials out of the garden. And yes, that would include the tree itself. I would avoid buying anything new from the store unless it was incidental and indispensable, opting for second-hand alternatives if possible. So why would I do that? I wanted to show how resourceful and creative we can be with whatever it is we have available. And to truly celebrate the spirit of a cottage garden Christmas, of make-do and mend, before consumerism took hold. There are a few elements that I want to craft, so I'm going to make a list and check it twice to keep me motivated. I would need a Christmas tree, obviously. Ornaments. Wait, wait, wait. Before we get to the fun Christmas decorating, there is an elephant in the room that needs addressing. If I want to decorate this room for Christmas, I really need to tackle this corner because this is the fireplace. Well, it was never really a true fireplace. It was more of a wood stove, I believe, back in the day. But it's in a sorry state and I need to tackle it before I even think about doing anything. So let's see what's happening in here. When I got to this house, I had always envisioned this living room fully decked for Christmas. It just has the idyllic bones for it, including the staircase and this fireplace. And although having it function as a real fireplace was out of the realm of possibilities because of the chimney, it would still function as the focal point to any Christmas decorating. Well, that's quite the surprise, isn't it? The reason why I think it hasn't been a true fireplace is because the hearth is quite small. And there is plaster here, so I need to redo the floor here with some concrete and then close up this flue because the chimney has already been closed up upstairs. So it's a completely useless chimney at this point. And speaking of bones, I had my own archaeological site in development. Poor creature. I scraped the loose plaster and cleaned the rubble, then plastered the walls to fill in the cracks, and finally filled the floor with concrete, finishing with the terracotta tinted hand textured concrete layer that gave the spot a warm homespun feeling. Then I feathered the new plaster with a wet brush to give the walls an antique texture. Finally, I picked a paint from my collection of mist tents and coated the inside wall of the fireplace with this rosy terracotta. I was hoping it would be less spank and more terracotta, but this would work. And with the mantle back in place, I can move on to my first item. Of course, the best place to get a tree for free is from the garden, except I don't have any evergreens growing in my garden. But I did have one material in abundance. Cut down twigs and branches. So I had to be creative. I picked a strong straight stem to be the main branch, trimmed it down to size and gathered smaller twigs to form the branches. I was taking inspiration directly from my early childhood in Brazil when my mother would use what was available down there to set up a tree out of sticks and cotton for snow. Christmas is in the middle of summer there. I drilled holes up the main stem in a spiral pattern so that I could insert and attach horizontal branches. Then I gave up pretending to use aesthetic and cozy period tools and then conjured up support for the tree to stand on its own with the help of a modern electrical drill. With it upright, I could start sticking in the side branches. The goal is to form a cone-like skeleton that has thicker and longer branches on the bottom, trimming out any excess. I further secured the branches in place with a screw and just like that, I had my skeletal tree. Wait, don't click away. I assure you it gets better. Oh, everything I touch gets ruined. While I could leave this tree just as it is, it could be a bit of a minimalist Scandinavian design where you just hang the ornaments and it would be okay. But that's not quite what I want. I don't want minimalism. I'm more in tune with maybe a Miss Havisham look. So how would I make this look like a proper evergreen? The solution was hiding in plain sight all around my garden. But in full disclosure, I had to plan this out a bit ahead because a few weeks prior, while the garden dressed itself in its exuberant garb of fallen glory, bejeweled by dahlia blooms and hemmed by the lacework of crafty spiders, I had the forethought of cutting and harvesting the pompous inflorescences of goldenrod. I had recognized they exhibited the perfect shape to mimic evergreens. So I harvested several batches and hung them upside down to dry. And a couple weeks later, they were ready to add body to my 100% free Christmas tree. Well, so far this challenge has worked because I haven't bought anything. Well, that's before this step. I like the way that this dried up. The color looks nice and muted. But because the flower starts to create these wind-borne fluffy things, I do need to seal up the ends. I'm going to spray paint them. Now, I had already some green spray paint, so this doesn't count because I had it and I needed to use it. But I went out and bought some antique white and I'll just slightly spray the tips and it's gonna remind us of some snow. That's my idea, at least. Let's see if it works. To attach the goldenrod to the tree skeleton, I decided against using adhesives like hot glue and opted for cotton thread instead, carefully tying the greenery to the twigs. This would allow me later to just easily compost the tree after removing the screws. Night fell as I tangled myself a thread and foliage. This process was taking much longer than I expected. All right, I'll admit that trying to recreate a tree so that it's a fake tree but out of natural materials so it looks like a real tree is a bit of a fool's errand. Just taking me longer than I expected. It still is interesting because it's transmuting a material that would be just garbage. But I think buying a real tree would be a worthwhile shortcut and then use the other materials that I plan on decorating with. But I'll finish what I started. Despite the difficulty, if you don't happen to have evergreens around you, this can be sort of a workaround. I do think it needs some filling in. I'm going to use the junction parts to just stick them over there. Despite my best efforts to collect and dry as many goldenrod branches as I could, the tree ended up a bit bare still. But I already had a plan in mind to remedy that. I also saved some of the fallen dry leaves for another idea I had on the back burner. We will get to it but for now I can check another item off my list. As sunlight ebbs away, I go out scouring my late season garden to find any potential decorative elements that could fill in the tree. I immediately gravitate towards the abundant hydrangea blossoms that had started to dry naturally. I love the greenish red hues hydrangeas fade into near the end of the season. Had I picked them some weeks earlier, they would have less of the browns. But since I needed as much filler as I could get my hands on, I had a plan to brighten up even the more dry blossoms. I also happened to notice rose hips in a neglected corner of the garden from the invasive multiflora rose. These would make for beautiful red accents among the other foliage. So I carefully collected them. I also harvested more of the beautiful panicle hydrangeas that were in the perfect stage of color and texture to dry without any intervention. With these materials in hand, I could start filling in the tree so that it gained a more solid presence. It's not bad at all really. If before I seemed apprehensive, I think right now I'm really looking forward to seeing how this goes because it's really growing on me. I just love the color scheme. The muted tones are perfect. I don't quite appreciate the very harsh red and green that's typical of Christmas. But I can get behind this. By the following daybreak, I was ready to find more natural ornaments to dress up the tree. I'm happy with the end result of the base layer. So now I can start adding even more material. I already put in some hydrangeas that were brown and I just gave them a bit of a spray paint of red and some. I used the cream color so it gives a frost effect. I'll continue building that up, but I want to have more things to add to it. Because I did not want to go to the store to buy regular ornaments, I headed into my garden shed to pick up some material I had saved a few months prior when I was envisioning this all-natural Christmas tree. They may look like ordinary garden debris, but I was imagining a way to transmute them into precious ornaments. I want to add some natural ornaments and these are things that I collected earlier, including these cardoon blooms, which I plan on gilding, as well as these pods from the trumpet vine, which is good because I'm removing the main source of its spreading, which is by seed, and they should look wonderful once gilded. It's a simple process, even if it's a bit finicky. I apply gilding adhesive over the surface and let it dry for half an hour until tacky. Then I carefully position the gold leaf and settle it with a soft brush, removing the excess. I already had these leftover imitation gold leaf supplies from a previous framing project, so I could use them without straying from my challenge, while finding a use for a craft supply that had been sitting idle for a few years. To further fill in the tree, I am using some ribbon, and I sourced these from a special place because I didn't just want to get it from a new store. While visiting a local indoor flea market, I found a stall selling all kinds of secondhand craft supplies, including ribbon, for a discounted price. I felt that this was the perfect way to recycle. To keep within the palette, I chose moss green, pastel pink, and cream colored ribbon, and formed them into different styles of bow, including informal small bows with long tails, a double looped unpretentious pink bow that reminded me of ballet, and a more typical Christmas bow with a wired green ribbon. But of course, a Christmas tree would not be a Christmas tree without lights, and I didn't want to just get mini lights, so I had something up my sleeve. Up my stairs, to be more accurate. Years ago, I had purchased a set of small brass lanterns while visiting an antique store. Of course, I was not crazy to use actual candles, so I would need to purchase inexpensive LED tea lights, and that was the only thing I ended up purchasing new besides the spray paint. These little lanterns were quite a find, I gotta say, and I wasn't even sure how I was going to use it when I got them a few years ago, but this is the perfect application because it's going to give that homespun feel of a pre-electricity era. I was very happy with the overall cottage look that was for me, I just needed to add a bit more brightness. What if I could transport a bit of the magic of my front cottage garden to this tree? What if the bright and reticulated presence of a flower-filled summer meadow could be incorporated into my tree? What if the memories of sun-kissed afternoons strolling through the June garden could be extended into the dark and dreary days of winter? Maybe they could. I had thought about this months before in the height of spring, when the garden clothed itself in fever-fueled blooms. After heavy rains threatened to forever erase the magic of this moment, I went out to collect some blossoms to dry them up for this exact purpose. Before we had shelves over shelves stocked to the ceiling with convenient and inexpensive Christmas decorations, we had to be a bit more creative to brighten our winter months. While my house has that quintessential Christmas quality to it, I did not decorate it for years because the garden had not matured yet and I knew that if I were to do it, I wanted to do it in this way, this slow-paced way with these materials, where I could relish each step and see every humble element build up to a greater design. A few months later, I could make use of the dried bunches of fever-fuel to further brighten the tree and remind me of the past glories of the garden. I put up the gilded seed pods that had transmuted into jewels and even gilded the base of a cardoon blossom with the breakaway fragments of gold leaf, but I eventually ended up letting the rest of the cardoons be natural with the fuzzy tops. Now that the Christmas tree is half done, I'm going to focus on the mantel decoration and obviously it's going to be dried plants. I wanted an arrangement that would complement the tree, so I got some of the leftover golden rod branches and tied them together into a bouquet using the cream ribbon. I then sourced three LED candles and played around with the positioning using the other elements to prop them into different levels. For obvious reasons, I chose to use LED candles because open flames next to dried foliage is the recipe for disaster. Then I added some of the leftover dried hydrangea and cardoon blooms to create an active composition with a strong focal point near the candles. I also incorporated some of the teasel seed heads I had collected. Their sculptural quality added dynamism to the arrangement. Finally, to heighten the Christmas feeling, I added rose hips all over it for a pop of color. In some ways, I like this more than the tree. With the main elements in place, I could focus on bringing together the rest of the space. I've got to do something about the layout of the living room because it's a special occasion, so I'm going to change things around a little bit just so it becomes a little bit more cozy. I decided to create a more intimate seating arrangement picking from the different antique chairs I had available. All these pieces I had collected over the years from visiting flea markets and such. I would find the broken and rejected pieces that were being sold for pittance and I would fix and reupholster them. The sofa I got for free, such was its broken condition. I love the imperfections in them and the feeling of faded glory of fallen empire they give to the space. Because they are all different, I needed to tie them together with a repeating element. So I decided to venture into my wardrobe of fabric scraps where the ghosts of unfinished projects and dead intentions live to find the raw material. I picked a collection of blue and golden cream fabrics to fashion matching pillow covers that would tie the seating together. I landed on the traditional patchwork star pattern because it is relatively simple to produce and has a homespun look that's also graphic and punchy. With the main patchwork motif sewn, I added strips of blue fabric to frame it. And then I was ready to sew the back. This consisted of cutting out a rectangle that is longer than the front panel, hemming both of the short ends, cutting the rectangle in half, and then overlapping them to create an envelope effect so I could insert the pillow later. I layered the front and back in the right order with the reverses to the outside, adding some brown cording to the edges in the middle. This is the trickiest part to sew and keep things tidy and in place. A zipper foot helps a lot. Once stitched in, I could pull the inside out and voila! I had the perfect pillowcases that had a Christmas vibe but could also be used at any time of the year. I just had to make many more of them. With that part of the decoration done, I need to focus on the stairs because, I mean, this house I could not not decorate the stairs with garlands. Problem is, since I don't want to buy anything and I don't really have evergreens from my yard, I'm gonna have to get creative. So I rummaged through craft supplies and found some old ripped up sheet music I had saved for collage projects. I diluted some of the green acrylic paint I had stashed away and needed to be used and painted over the paper in a semi-transparent wash, both sides. Once dried, I cut the sheets in half, folded them and cut up a fringe pattern. I then got some cotton twine and tacky glue and went about gluing the paper fringe onto the string, rolling it in a spiral pattern. Once fully dried, I could intertwine my paper garland with a set of mini string lights I had recently found that were stashed away more than a decade ago. While I'm happy with the homespun quality of this, I don't think that the color is working quite as well because the tree and everything else is mossy green from the dried foliage. This one's just a bit too vibrant, so I need to do something about that. Nothing that a paint intervention couldn't solve, or at least in this case, attenuate. I just mixed the watery mossy green and carefully brushed over the garland. Not perfect, but it would do. My Christmas decorations were almost complete, but if you remember, I still had the dried fallen leaves I had saved when building the tree. It was for an idea I had in my mind that was also a couple months in the making. Would it be worth the trouble? I started by cutting out a triangle from some thin cardboard and forming it into a cone shape. I then punched several holes through its surface using a sharp tool. Mixing yellow blue and a bit of red paint, I created the perfect mossy green tone to complement the dried leaves. Then I painted the cone, allowing it to dry. Next, I crushed the dry leaves to create a natural flocking material. I spread white glue over the cone and then liberally sprinkled the dried leaves to coat the surface and create a beautiful natural texture. Before the glue dried, I put the cone on top of an LED bulb so I could locate and clear the holes I had previously punched. At this stage, you can see where this is going, but I still had a key element to add to these Christmas trees, which I had thought about a few months ago also. While the garden was in its peak, I went out and collected several of the daisy blossoms so that I could use them in this project. But unlike the white feverfew, I could not simply hang these to dry since they would lose their petals and shape. So I employed a bit of a trick to make these blossoms dry fast. I surrounded them with the crystal type cat litter. This material is basically silica crystals, a desiccant that florists use for dried flowers. With this hack, I could carry more of the joy of my summer into the winter. Let's take a look to see how these turned out. We had two days of heat and yet they've been able to dry. So the good thing is that it preserves some of the color and obviously the petals get shriveled, but it still has an interesting texture. So I'll store these gently so I don't further damage them until I'll need them later on. My plan was to glue these blossoms around the paper cone to create mini tabletop Christmas tree decorations. But with this technique, I could also have fashioned beautiful ornaments that would be the epitome of a cottagecore Christmas. Maybe next year. At first, I used tacky glue to secure these in place, which is a neater option. Then I switched to hot glue because it was faster. I also added sprigs of rose hips to create more of the pattern I wanted. To top it off, I collected some of these skeletonized tomatillo husks I found on the ground at the end of the groaning season. These lacy pods would create an ethereal and delicate ornament that would shine with the light from inside. I made three of these trees using the dried flowers I had collected, as well as some straw flower blossoms that naturally dried up on the plant. If you pick the buds young before they bloom, you can use them as is. Or you can remove the seeds from the older flowers so they stop the process of creating their seed fuzz. I also added some lace ribbon to one of these trees to further highlight the festive aesthetic. Putting these over LED candles creates a charming ornament. I love how all the elements came into place. I think the room is ready for Christmas. Except I think I need a rug to pull everything together. Because of asthma, I cannot use a regular rug. So I'm gonna do a painted floor cloth just like this one for my living room. Except the process does take some time and I gotta finish this quickly. So I'm gonna use the one I already started for my library instead. If you remember my library makeover video, I did not tackle the floor there using some temporary washable rag rugs. But about a year ago, I decided to start making a custom painted floor cloth to finish off the space. I want to get a painted rug done for this room. I've been meaning to do this for a while since I disliked this floor very much. So I'm gonna try to get it to cover as much of the room as possible. But I'm using some fabric that I already had. It's a linen and cotton blend. It's not big enough as you can see to span the whole room and only leave a little bit of an edge around it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna sew up a border first and then I'm gonna paint it. Hopefully it's gonna work when it shrinks. I haven't tried it so we'll see but I do love to experiment. I usually use a 100% cotton canvas drop cloth because the heavier material just works better. The most difficult part is to paint it with latex paint so that you have a smooth wrinkle-free surface at the end. You have to do it over a flat floor surface. It is a good idea to line the floor with one smooth layer of plastic to prevent it from sticking to the floor and painting it. For my thinner fabric, I decided to paint it in sections. Even ironing it first. The whole thing was a big mistake. So it didn't quite work. I'm quite disappointed. I even tried to pin it up with the board. Try to keep it straight and smooth. But you know, this weight of material is just not right for this application. Canvas, it tends to shrink up as you wet it. So it's possible to pre-wet your canvas, lay it over some plastic, allow it to dry and then smooth it with an iron and that should allow you to paint over it without having to pin up all the sides. So at this point, I either have to work with this with a few wrinkles or I don't know, I think I'm gonna go crazy a bit. But if you can't go with smooth, double down on the rough. It was a bit of a method to my madness because maybe I could get it to have more of a leather-like effect. The next step is simple. You just have to paint the rug several times over with regular latex paint. About five to six coats is ideal to create a thicker material. This is a perfect project to use up old cans of house paint you're trying to get rid of. Once this is fully dried, you can then paint whatever pattern or image you like over it. As long as you use latex or acrylic paint. I wanted to do a motif with figures. A bit like a renaissance fresco. I decided on painting three Brazilian muses inspired by classical sensibilities. These figures would represent a muse of music, of literature and of art. A bit like the classical muses or the three graces. I was painting this completely from imagination and without reference. So I wanted it to be an image with loose brushwork and a painterly sensibility. I was working with some random cheap acrylic paint mixed with wall paint I had laying around. So needless to say, it was a bit of an uphill battle with the colors and tones. Placing human figures on a rug can be challenging since the artwork will be seen from any angle. Thus, I decided on a loose floating composition with the central figure upside down in relation to the other two. I knew I wanted to punch out the figures from the background. So while the muses were painted with terracotta earthy tones, I chose to use blue for the background. This would tie in nicely with the colors of my library. I could not do a rug without botanical motifs. So of course, I added the plants most associated with each field. Flax for art, papyrus for literature and reeds for music. After painting the base layer with the approximate tones and shapes, I went over and refined the features and drawing through the second layer. What I loved the most about painting a rug is there was a freedom from expectations that a traditional painting imposes on you. I could be loose, free and inventive. I added a pink ribbon behind the muse of music to balance out the composition in negative space. This would end up tying well with my Christmas tree even though its use on the living room would be only temporary. I refined the last muse figure, Art, who lives in an upside down and floating stance. Then I added extra ribbon motif to tie the figures together and create more of a patterned look that makes sense for a rug. Finally, I painted over the border with quotes of famous Latin sayings about the arts. Despite the lower quality paints that tend to gray out as they dry, I was quite pleased with the end result. I was only unsure about the brightness of the blue tone of the background. So I decided to glaze the whole thing with watered down terracotta paint in a matte acrylic medium to dirty up the tones, giving it more of a cohesive antique look. Once dried, I gave it two coats of water-based polyurethane and my rug was ready for use. Adding it to the living room completed the space. It is a bit smaller than ideal, but it will do for now. And in the future, I'll make a bigger one to replace it. And now the living room was ready for Christmas. What are your thoughts on this? Was making the tree from scratch worth it? What did you enjoy the most? And what could I possibly paint for the final rug of the living room? I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you want to support the channel, you can buy art from my Etsy shop or support me through Patreon. Thank you so much for watching and see you next time.