A Christmas mantel, au naturale

I’m so glad you all loved the mantel inspiration photos! I was so inspired by the natural looks and all the “fluff” – I think it worked for our mantel as well. I spent much of today messing around and having fun with it. I’m so pleased with the final result, I hope you love it too!

I started with natural looking pics of greenery from Big Lots – I used three at $3 each. I just laid one on each end of the mantel, one in the middle, flattening them out as much as possible:

Then, I took the magnolias and all of the glammy (word?) stuff out of the greenery I had used last year (see previous post), then just folded it in half, and it ended up being exactly the length I needed. I laid it right on top of the greenery above.

Because I really loved the look of the long pine needles, I used more garland from Big Lots, for $9, and cut it up into a bunch of pieces, just sticking it here and there in the greenery. Then I cut up some sparkly branches and stuffed them in too:

The BL garland had the huge pinecones in it, but I added a few more of my own as well.

I took my clearance WalMart lanterns from our deck and repurposed them to work on the mantel. I was so pleased with how it turned out…

I was still craving a little somethin’ though – some color! I just can’t do completely natural – it’s against my nature. ;) So I cut up some red beady stuff I had and stuffed it in here and there, and then hung my dollar store stars from each piece of ironwork:

I took some of the beady thingamabobs and sprinkled them on the pinecones in the lanterns:

 

Which was super easy to do, because the blasted things were flying off everywhere anyway. Argh.

The result? Lurve:

I found this little reindeer at HomeGoods and I seriously could not resist him. Adorable. He picks up the red touches in the mantel perfectly:

         

Hang in there – I took a crazy amount of pictures…

   

    

I used dollar store candleholders in the lanterns, and made them a bit taller by putting them on top of blocks of wood. I wanted to put faux snow in the lanterns, but they only open in the front, so it was next to impossible to get the snow in there. (Believe me, I tried.) So I just used my fluffy snow stuff instead:

Because the greenery is so full (sigh), I propped up the lanterns and the tree with books and boxes so they wouldn’t disappear. You can’t even see them when you look at the mantel:

Do you luuuuurve it? Huh? Do ya??

I hope so! I do. I had so much fun with this! One more mantel to go, and I hope to have that up this week. It’s MUCH simpler though. :)

The winner of Pampering Beki’s necklace giveaway is Melissa Howard from Melissa and Cas – please email me and I’ll get you in touch with Beki! I still haven’t heard from Kat at Measuring my life in love who was the winner of the vinyl giveaway – Kat, give me a holler! Enjoy ladies!

P.S. Did anyone watch the Behind the Magic Disney special on HGTV tonight? OMG – it was fantastic. (Popcorn as big as my head! Sixty-five foot trees people!) Check out a rerun if you get a chance! Spectacular!!