Bringing some Christmas magic to our Victorian front door

Again, due to our current sitch I'm still thinking of more statement Christmas decorations done on a budget or preferably free!

This week I wanted to make a feature out of our beautiful Victorian front door. 

Inspiration usually comes to me if I don't consciously sit and think of ideas, they just seem to pop into my head from nowhere.

I remembered we had a roll of chicken wire in the garage.....always a good starting point. This was left over from converting a metal wheelbarrow into a barbeque last summer. We also had an old Christmas tree up in the loft that went with us each time we moved home. 

When I brought it down it made me smile. I remember buying it before my youngest son was born - he's now 20. The tree cost £32.99 and I think it came from Woolworths!! A tree like that now would cost over £100.

Well that certainly got the creative juices flowing! 

I'm now thinking red/purple, my two favourite colours. I knew there was a bag of voile somewhere in the house (well, doesn't everyone have a bag of this in their house?!!) 

The bag contained various colours, lengths and widths of voile. This was left over from a table display that I made for somebody's 70th birthday party a few years ago. 

Unfortunately, the red and purple were in short strips, so I had to just go with that. I also found some spare silver baubles in the loft, as one does!

All that remained were the lights, so it was a trip down to B&M where I bought some outdoor lights for around £24 for 20 metres, a lot of length for a reasonable price.

After measuring the area where the decoration was to be placed, I then proceeded to cut the chicken wire to fit. The edges were extremely sharp so I wrapped them with parcel tape.

The old tree was chopped into little branches using wire cutters and then I attached these to the chicken wire using small cable ties. 

The whole structure was really heavy and it had to be hung high up. I'm not very tall so I had to have help with this. Cable ties were used to attach it securely to the spindles above the front door.

The lights were attached to the branches and wrapped around the support pillar we share with our neighbours. Strips of red/purple were placed in alternate stripes and baubles were mixed in.

The result was stunning but the bag of voile was calling to me to create something more! 

We had a horrible pine cone-covered door wreath hanging on the front door. It was sprayed gold at one time, but over the years it lacked lustre. Without being precious and precise I grabbed lengths of voile and randomly wrapped them around the wreath. 

It looked a bit uninteresting so I wound some gold beads over the voile which also held the whole thing in place. 

It was then topped off with a gold bow.

So at the front of the house we have a pink, cerise and gold wreath on a red front door, purple, red and silver decorations above the front door and a yellow, pink, and blue Christmas tree in the bay window (see last week's post)

As always nothing ever matches or compliments, but I prefer this look. Loads of colour to me equals interesting.

Not always easy on the eye, but certainly stimulating!