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  • Hi, I’m Emily

    Emily Fazio

    I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle.

    You can find me writing for HGTV and DIY Network, follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note if you'd like. I love notes.

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Draping The Halls

December 2, 2011

I didn’t actually mean to keep this whole week of posts so holiday-decor-centric… I do have new non-festive projects in the works, I’m just getting a little held up by paint drying, mis-dyeing and wood measurement snafus (plus I’ve been sitting around staring into the Christmas tree lights and licking the Thanksgiving apple pie tray clean, so that’s been eating into my productivity).

Anyways, I’m keeping my holiday home decor costs to a minimum this year. No new LED lights (maybe for next year if they go on sale at the end of the month), no excessively-garland-wrapped stair railings, no crazy manger settings, no fully-operational train sets. Already I’ve saved $30+ by buying a mini-tree, and another pretty penny by stringin’ my own tin foil balls, but I took the sparkly sheen of that garland a wee bit further this week to extend the joy (for about 12-cents, yo).

DIY doorway garland.

DIY Foil Garland. Happiness!

The doorway garland in this post was inspired 100% by an Anthropologie display, and of course I was moving throughout the mall much too quickly to take a picture of it from afar, only in passing, squeezing in close enough to snap this shot and mental-note that it was constructed of foil, string, and good ol’ hot glue. Prettykins.

Anthro DIY projects rule.

In my local store (maybe in yours too) they were strung strand-by-strand in a canopy fashion over the entryway display, but they’d look pretty canopied anywhere (like maybe over your bed and down behind the headboard [drool], or straight down a wall covered by a frame gallery [double drool]), but I decided to simplify the interpretation in order to decorate the open doorways on the first floor of the house.

Editor’s Update 12/2/2011, 10:50PM: I happened to be at Anthropologie again today and snapped a real-life shot of the display. Silvery, draping, dreaminess:

Anthro display. Awesome.

For mere pennies, I borrowed about 4-feet of tin foil from my kitchen supply, and brought much more joy to my living room. If you recall, I’ve had a mega-crush on the rainbow garland that I made for Pete‘s surprise 40th birthday. Such a crush, that the garland hung in place for 4-months, just until this week, swirling with glee as we walked beneath it (that being, if paper garland can really show emotions).

Dining room wall, but also, a hint of birthday fever in that strand of garland.

Cutting circles out of tin foil was a little agitating at first because they weren’t symmetrical and were too jagged. I solved this problem to a degree by taking the cap off my baking powder container and creating impressions in the flat sheet of foil; they’re still entirely freehanded, I didn’t use a punch, but it helped to have guide lines to follow. I rocked out several dozen circles in a short period of time (Only an hour, maybe? While we listened to the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. Easy.)

Foil impressions courtesy of the baking powder lid.

Just like the awe-inspiring strands in Anthropologie, I attached each circle to string (essentially free, just some kite string-type roll that I had on hand) with the hot glue gun (less than one stick of glue leftover from some other crafty project).

Gluing the foil to the string. I created a series of strings. Six, to be exact. Three longer strands were hung in an overlapping pattern in the doorway between the living room and the dining room (replacing the rainbow garland happiness but instead, radiating a beautiful mirrored light). Very appealing and sweet!

Tin foil garland I did the same on the opposite doorway into the kitchen, just with shorter strands/fewer circles because it was a shorter doorway. From this angle, you can see that I just hung them temporarily with thumb tacks and staggered their placement to create swooping, drooping decor.

Kitchen doorway garland: You can see how it's pinned with thumb tacks if you look closely. The light reflections this foil garland provides are pretty, albeit hard to capture on camera. It’s enough to catch your eye each time you walk beneath them.

Hope you try it too. It’s unexpected doorway happiness. You won’t be let down.

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Decor  / DIY  / Holiday-Related Projects

Emily
I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle. I've been a freelancer writer for 10+ years and you can find my work on popular home and garden sites, like HGTV.com. Follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note.

8 Comments


michelle@decorandthedog
December 2, 2011 at 9:20 am
Reply

Cute idea!



Cait @ Hernando House
December 2, 2011 at 1:07 pm
Reply

So cute!

Also, this had me laughing “plus I’ve been sitting around staring into the Christmas tree lights and licking the Thanksgiving apple pie tray clean, so that’s been eating into my productivity”. That sounds about like things around our house recently. Lots of cooking & stuffing our faces, and not much DIY. (… she typed aroudn a bowlful of pasta).



    Cait @ Hernando House
    December 2, 2011 at 1:08 pm

    PS- I totally blame any and all typos on the aforementioned bowl of pasta. It’s all up in my grill, yo. Making it hard to type. (ahh reading blogs on lunchbreak)

    Emily
    December 2, 2011 at 5:12 pm

    You’re awesome. You know what I had to stop eating in front of the computer even though it was good for productivity? Grapefruit. Too squirty. Screws up the computer. Ended up spending more time cleaning it up. (mmm, pasta.)

Gin
December 2, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Reply

I know that Anthropologie display! It was very impressive in the whole window, but I like how you’ve scale it down for normal life.



    Emily
    December 2, 2011 at 5:12 pm

    Thanks Gin!

Katrina
December 3, 2011 at 12:42 am
Reply

Just enough lovely shine! Very cool – I’m loving your recent adventures with tin foil



    Emily
    December 3, 2011 at 9:47 am

    Thanks Katrina!

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  • HI, I’m Emily

    Emily Fazio

    I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle. Follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note if you'd like. I love notes.

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