Working on My Winter Mantle (Again!)

After not changing my mantle decor for so many years (and me a lover of change! Shocking!), I have been playing around with my mantle since Christmas.  Would you like to see the transitions its made in just two months time?  You do?  Good, because I’m ready to do a little show-n-tell. 🙂

My first attempt at a Christmas/Winter mantle started like this. I built the gate, which I talked about here.

I am having trouble with the

formatting here so I’m just going

to add a bunch of

extra

spaces

here to get it

to align

properly.

Just a

little

more and there,

 it’s done.

I thought it looked a little bare so I called my big sis, who contacted her personal interior decorator, who just happens to be her dear sister-in-law for some help. Her advice was to move the gate off to the side instead of center, get larger branches & get some large snowflakes. I followed her ideas except for the snowflakes. I added some burlap to the greenery, found a cute snowman at hobby Lobby and voila(!) here was my new look.

I tweaked things a little more, still not completely pleased with the arrangement.  I ended up spray painting the branches white, added beads to the jar and also added an apothecary jar with blue marble/rocks inside.  Anyways, I liked it for awhile but then it just started looking Halloweenish to me – not exactly what I wanted to be feeling since it was Christmas you know!

So after Christmas was over I thought I’d try and give it a different look and make it even more of a “Winter” mantle.  This is what I’ve come up with since. I trimmed the branches down. I thought they looked too big originally and I also cut off some of the side shoots so they would look more spare. I know the mirror should be larger for the space but it’s what I had on hand.

This same day I had taken down all the Christmas photos we had received over the holidays but  I still wanted to enjoy them so I decided to see what they would look like on the gate that had been on the mantle.  I like it!

So that’s the progression my mantle has made in just two months time.  It’s very interesting to me how you can take one space and do so many things with it.  It’s just another way we ladies enjoy all the things that make up home.  My hubby still likes the original arrangement we had for years the best, but he’s a good sport.  He’s puts up with me used to me and my love of change.

Before                                          

After

Do you change your mantle with the seasons?