Stick it on the Mantle

When I decided to overhaul my holiday mantle this year, I also wanted to change the top of the mantle. I made two changes or additions, one of which I’ll show you now. It was a great simple project that looks really beautiful in person.

Walking around Michaels, I found these bunches of gold sticks in the floral area. They were pretty, only I didn’t know what to do with them. I like something tall on each side of my mantle and thought these would make a great starting place. But next I needed a decorative container to put them in. So I found a great shaped container, but the exterior finish on it was too informal and casual for my taste, so I decided I could use the same wide, olive/bronze taffeta ribbon I used for the ribbon garland to change the exterior of these containers. Here’s how it went…

You Will Need
-container of desired shape and size (remember that you need to take the height of your container into consideration when doing a project where the end result will be tall)
-green floral foam block (In my case, I needed one block and sliced it in half)
-gold or white bundled sticks from floral department (Michaels also had some really beautiful white ones that I’m considering picking up for next year)
-spanish moss (floral department of your craft store)
-10 yards of ribbon
-glue gun

Step 1

The first thing I did was cut my foam block in half and stick it into my container. I then used one bunch of sticks for each container, and stuck them in where I wanted them. I should note, though, that I did have to trim the sticks because their original height plus the container would have made them much too tall for my mantle.

Step 2

Once that was done, I glued clumps of Spanish moss to the floral foam to hide it, and make the container look nice and full.

Step 3

My final step was gluing on the ribbon (sorry, no picture of that step!). All I did was start in the back of the container and glue one end of my ribbon, and just kept wrapping (overlapping edges to give it a pleated look) it around, securing it with glue here and there. I love the ribbon wrapped result so much, and it matches the ribbon garland perfectly. And with one flanking each side of the mantle, it really helps complete my ribbon look this year.