Rustic Christmas Fireplace Decoration.
This past Christmas was all about white, silver, and rustic. Upon coming across a huge load of pallet wood, I got inspired and created a few decorative rustic pieces. I poured a ton of time and effort into the prototypes as I wanted to ensure that each was just perfect. My efforts payed off as they turned out to be a big hit and I was swamped with a ton of orders!
I loved each and every one of the pieces so when it came to sprucing up my own fireplace, I couldn't decide which idea to go with! Finally, after dawdling back and forth a thousand times, I combined two of my favourite pieces (Noel Town and Silent Night) to make one grand fireplace mantel decoration!
To make this piece, I began by grey and white dry brushing the largest wood pallet I had (27" x 50"). The wood was pretty new and it looked really fresh. I had to be really generous with my paint as I only wanted a little bit of the natural yellow wood colour to peek through. I then put some scrap pieces of wood to good use (I knew it was smart to hoard them all this time!) and cut out three houses, each a different shape and size. I painted them white. Next, I stained a few magazine pages with black tea to give them that aged, dark beige colour. Once the pages were dry, I cut out a few squares and rectangles and glued them on the houses to represent windows and doors. Next, I made the trees by breaking thin branches (also from the forest) to desired sizes and stacking/gluing them onto the pallet until I was happy with the size of each tree. I lightly dry brushed the tree tops in white to give the appearance of being covered in snow. Then, the houses were adhered to the pallet. To frame the entire scene, I glued a couple of curvy branches on each end of the pallet. I cut out a few stars from the tea-stained paper and attached them to select branches. I had a twig of white foam "berries" left over from another project, so I picked off the foam balls and individually placed them randomly throughout to represent falling snow. Finally, I dry brushed in white a large piece of tree bark (another treasure from the forest!) along the edge that would be the top of the "ground" in the scene and glued it down into place. To finish off the piece, I used a fine paint brush to paint on (free hand) a portion of the lyrics from "Silent Night".
I absolutely adore how this piece turned out! It's so different that any other I've seen. It definitely has been a conversation starter with anyone visiting our home this Holiday season. But, my favourite thing about it is that this beauty was literally made out of garbage. Who knew that trash-bound pallets, left over scrap pieces of wood, broken tree bark and branches, left over paint, and magazines from the recycling bin could be reused to make such a lovely thing?
