Hybrid Tutorial: Sprucing Up Your Christmas Centerpiece

Hi everyone, Dalis here, to show you how to spruce up an old Christmas centerpiece.  Yes, Christmas is around the corner and it’s time to start working on your decorations. In our family we decorate the weekend after Thanksgiving day, so I am just getting ready with a few little changes in the decorations this year.

This is the final version of my new and improved Christmas centerpiece.  As you can imagine the new and improved part are all those super duper adorable hybrid adornments added to the centerpiece.

When choosing the digital kit you will be using it is very important to remember to follow your holiday colors and theme.  What you are doing is adding to the decorations — you don’t want to have colors clashing in your decor.  In my case we always decorate the main entrance of the house in the traditional RED, GREEN, WHITE and GOLD colors, that is why I picked Candy-Cane Christmas.  I could have picked Christmas Whimsy but I thought the adornments might get lost with all the greenery in the centerpiece.  So not only think of the colors but how they will play with the decoration you will be putting them into.

Of course also think about how much time you have to make your adornments — check the stores for add-on kits that will coordinate with the kit you plan to use.  This Candy-Cane Christmas Gift Tags Add-on is the perfect little help I needed to boost my Christmas spirit.

Now let’s work on these little cute additions to our centerpiece.

1.  Open in your software of preference all of your FAVORITE elements, journaling tags and goodies you will like to use.

2.  Create your adornments, remembering to add shadows where needed.  Keep some simple and double up in layers in some cases, you want to balance them out, to spark interest in your centerpiece. Print them and cut the out.  NOTE:  Shape punches or die-cuts are an easy fast way to cut these out.

On the first one here I just grabbed one of the heart elements and add it to my print page.  I removed the cute doodle at the end because it would be difficult to cut out.

The second one is a middle ground — I wanted to add a sentiment to express to all of our visitors but since I wanted it to be the main sentiment I kept the elements clean and just added the Happy Holidays 2010 in the same font that SuzyQ Scraps used in her kit.

NOTE:  Did you know you can match SuzyQ Scraps’ font easily, just check her TOU file that comes with the kit at the end she always mentions the font she used.  I really do love and appreciate that she does this, because I am a matchy matchy font kind of girl.

On the last one shown here I used one of the cute gift tags from the Candy-Cane Christmas Gift Tags Add-on.

3.  Optional – Laminate your items.  If this is a centerpiece that will be touched, or something you want to keep for years to follow or if you are going to be putting these into a fresh flower arrangement, then I do recommend laminating them.  Specially if you are will be watering your centerpiece.  Cut out each piece after laminating leaving at least 1/8 inch so the laminating work doesn’t split up.

4.  Add some 3D interest to your items, I decided to use jewels to add a bit of sparkle.  You could add ribbons, buttons, flowers, whatever makes you smile.  I used the i-rock tool to put my jewels in. Remember if you laminated the adornments some things like glitter glue might not work.  Also you need to use a glue that will work with slick surfaces like the laminating film.

5.  Now that they are all ready and assembled you need to choose a way to add them to your center piece, you could punch a hole and add some ribbons to hang each little piece out.  I wanted mine to look like they are peaking out, so I used wire.  Nothing fancy, nothing hard.

You will need wire (not shown, I used 25 gauge black wire), round needed nose pliers, wire cutter.

You want to make a spiral out of wire using your round nose plier and your fingers.  I also recommend that you do a finished loop at the other end of the wire, since the cuts with the wire cutters can be sharp (experience talking here).

The heart one is the one that is a bit more complex, I slid the heart in between the spiral we did in the previous step and then moving the left over wire on the back of the heart created another swirl to grab the heart from the other side, then finished wrapping  more wire at the bottom of the heart.  You could wrap your wire on the front for a different look.

For the strips with sayings it was as easy as sliding the strip on the first spiral and then creating a second spiral to hold the paper in piece.

6.  Now it’s a matter of putting all the adornments in your centerpiece, play with high and lows to add interest and movement to your centerpiece.  Follow the shape that the centerpiece has and have fun.

And I leave you with a close up of my favorite shot.