Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Suspense over, here is my Christmas tree

White, turquoise and silver vintage Christmas tree
 
Yaaaaaaaay, finally! You won't believe how long it took me to get these photos the right size and where I wanted them to be in this post. I had a fight with the compose toolbar and won lol. 
 
My tree is just how I pictured it to be, so magical with its shiny and bright, antique and vintage decorations. The aqua blues, silver and white look so good together. It is like looking and a snowy, frosty, winter scene, a bit like Narnia. And very reminiscent of the large blue and white Christmas tree we had when I was little. It is quite a contrast to the 26 C heat, plus high humidity, we are experiencing in New Zealand at the moment.
 
When I was searching on Ebay for my decorations, I used my snipping tool and snipped pictures of the baubles that I liked. Then put scaled up pictures of them into OneNotes to help me to work out the right combination and number of baubles to buy. OneNotes is so useful, I use it to organise things all the time as you can see from the coloured headings below.
 
 Using OneNotes for Christmas tree design ideas
 
 When the decorations arrived, most of them were extremely dirty. They had decades of dust and grime on them. Some of them date back to the 1930's. I spent a whole day cleaning them very carefully. I used nothing but my breath and Q-tips. I breathed on small areas at a time, a bit like a kid misting up a window to make finger patterns, then with Q-tips I gently worked on the glass, avoiding the glass glittered areas. I didn't want to damage any of the fragile finishes. A couple of the decorations had candle wax on them which I left. I think it adds to their charm. I was amazed at how shiny and bright they came up. You can see the difference between the snipped pictures above of my decorations before I bought them and how they look on the tree after cleaning them up.  
 
teal blue and white vintage Christmas tree
 
 It is lovely sitting working at my desk now with this view. My cats are behaving themselves and haven't jumped on the desk to investigate yet. But it won't be long before they do. Guido, my Siamese cat, is very careful though. He always treads delicately around things. 
 
Vintage blue and silver Christmas tree decorations
 
Tomorrow morning I am going to be baking my Christmas cake, which reminds me that I forgot that I need to soak the fruit in brandy overnight.....oooops........will be right back.......
 
Okay, all done!
 
Then in the afternoon I will finish decorating my big green Christmas tree with red and gold baubles, plus vintage spun cotton snowman cotton decorations that I have started collecting. I also need to wrap all the Christmas presents which I always do sitting by the Christmas tree listening to old Christmas music from YouTube. I love this time of year so much. 
 
Antique aqua blue and silver Christmas tree ornaments
 

Back soon xxx
 

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