Evergreen Tips

Rachel Mendell — Staff

Can you believe it? It’s time to take the Christ­mas tree out of stor­age once again! Trim­ming the tree is one of the high­lights of the sea­son. I am often asked how I go about trim­ming my trees. In this arti­cle, I thought I would give you some of my tips on dec­o­rat­ing a tree.

If you have an arti­fi­cial tree that gets boxed up each year, it is so impor­tant to refluff the branches. Like­wise, refluff­ing wreathes and gar­lands will make them, too, look fresher and more attrac­tive. The same goes for any rib­bons and bows that may be attached. A lit­tle extra atten­tion to these things can make all the difference.

Once the refluff­ing is done and the lights are checked, I deter­mine whether or not I will use any beaded gar­lands or rib­bons on my tree. There is noth­ing that says both can­not be used. You can mix the two items if you desire. Also you can use rib­bons and/or beaded gar­lands in dif­fer­ent color com­bi­na­tions. They can either com­pli­ment one another, or they can con­trast. Get cre­ative! It usu­ally is bet­ter to have some sort of repet­i­tive pat­tern to fol­low. Repi­ti­tion gives your tree a sense of order. For instance, maybe you have a blue rib­bon gar­land that you want to put on your tree but you also have some lovely crys­tal bead gar­lands and some strik­ing sil­ver metal­lic rib­bon. You don’t have to choose between them; you can use all three. They will com­pli­ment each other nicely and give the tree a dif­fer­ent look. In this sce­nario, I would start with the blue rib­bon, pro­ceed around the tree spac­ing such that I could then start the crys­tal beads and in turn the sil­ver rib­bon so that the gar­lands alter­nate down the tree. You could also twist the two rib­bons together loosely and alter­nate with the crys­tal beads.

After any rib­bons and/or beads are placed, I would place those orna­ments that require extra sup­port or space. If these orna­ments would be hung later in the “tree trim­ming”, it would be much more dif­fi­cult to find the right spot. Any par­tic­u­lar orna­ments that I would want to be “front and cen­ter” would also be hung early.

Susan Gim­bel is owner of The Ever­green Com­pany in Uptown Galion. Visit the web­site www.myevergreencompany.com for addi­tional infor­ma­tion about the store.

Posted by Guest 1 Columnist on Nov 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.