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This Christmas tree has been in the works for a while now. Just a little over a year ago my sister and I went to Houston to visit my parents. My Momma had recently had surgery on her broken ankle to pin it back together and she was having a hard time getting around. That’s not to say that we didn’t cart her all around town, anyway. I have pictures from that day where she’s tipped over but smiling and riding on the little motorized shopping carts in a bazillion different stores.
I thought I had gotten a video of her getting her little thing hover ’round type of thing stuck in the At Home store that used to be Garden Ridge. We were looking at Christmas ornaments and she turned in the middle of an aisle and didn’t quite make it. I was laughing so hard at her going forward and backward and forward and backward and my sister trying to help her and my Momma just pulling her around with that thing that I didn’t actually hit record. I just took a single pic instead :) I did, however, get a video of my sister riding Momma’s walker around the parking lot at the deli we went to for lunch. There were a bunch of cops there and I think they might have gotten a bit of a kick out of it. I know I laughed pretty hard :)
While we were at At Home we noticed all of the really colorful ornaments and I knew I wanted a rainbow Christmas tree. They didn’t have all of the colors out, though, and lots of them were jammed up underneath the displays. But that wasn’t going to stop Jen. She crammed herself underneath that stuff and dug out every color I needed so I could make this rainbow ombre Christmas tree today!
First things first, after I fluffed up my white Christmas tree I realized that there were quite a few gaps I couldn’t fix by fluffing. So I’m going to show you how to fill out a white Christmas tree here really quickly.
Grab a really wide roll of deco mesh in white. I got this at Michael’s for half of at a cost of $5. They also have the same size for a little less than $5 regularly priced at Walmart but I preferred the iridescent color in this particular mesh. My tree is 5 feet tall and I used a little over 3/4 of the roll. You should be able to fill out up to a 7 foot tall tree if it is on the skinnier side with a single roll. Purchase 2 if your tree is very fat or very tall.
Grab the end of the mesh and shove it into the tree near the pole in the middle. Start in the middle at the top.
Wrap the mesh around the tree jabbing it inside and near the center pole sporadically. You can go around and around or for a more interesting look, cut lengths of different sizes and place here and there with no pattern. I chose the around and around method!
Be sure to keep your filling at similar distances apart. I actually went between each tier of faux branches.
See now isn’t that a bit better? For $5 and less than 10 minutes I really think it was worth the time and effort.
Next up, decorating my white tree to become a rainbow ombre thing of my dreams :) Here are all of those ornaments my sister dug out at At Home for me and a package of white pipe cleaners and a pair of junk scissors.
To hang my ornaments I used the white pipe cleaners to act as ornament hangers. These suckers blend in so well with the tree you can’t pick them out without really, really trying. I think it gives a nice and seamless look to the tree.
If your tree is a natural color you can use green pipe cleaners, or they have “pine” looking pipe cleaners at Hobby Lobby and I think I saw them at Walmart, too this year.
With the pipe cleaner you can bring the ball as close to, or as far away from a branch as you need it to perfectly fill out the tree.
I also love adding sprays to my Christmas trees. I think the stuff poking out here and there add a lot of dimension to a tree that helps keep the look exciting. Since I had a very specific color scheme in mind I had to work with what I could find to make my tree work.
If you can’t find sprays that are as thick as you’d like, you can take several and band them together at the ends with a pipe cleaner to form one, larger spray.
Now I’d normally shove my ornament balls in around the tree first but I wanted to be sure I used all of my sprays and clip on poinsettia flowers. It’s so much easier to start with the ball ornaments to fill out your tree with color and then add your others on after. But since this is such a small tree and I have so much stuff I went about it totally backwards. It was completely doable but a bit more frustrating than working the “right” way.
You might notice there are no orange flowers at the bottom just yet and that is because you cannot find orange poinsettias to save your life. All of the other colors I snapped up at Walmart no problem-o but for the bottom tier I had to make by spray painting pink flowers orange.
To keep from spending too much more money on the tree I got one of those fake snow blanket type of tree skirts that have been around for ages and ages. My kitties are still in Houston for the time so I wasn’t so worried about this tree being climbed on as I have in the past. But I did still use a box to secure my larger, living room tree just to be safe.
At night the look is more severe but still as lovely and I’ am really happy with all of the color it brings to my office. It glows at night and has for a few weeks now. And again I find myself wondering, just how nuts do my new neighbors think I am? I have only gotten the opportunity to talk to 2 neighbors and so far only 1 spoke English so unless I get fluent really quickly I may never know what my neighbors think of me :) And that’s probably okay!
It turns out that my sweet baby JouJou is a bit interested in the tree but he hasn’t tried to climb it once. Instead he likes to lay on the tree skirt beneath but only when it’s really dark in the room and the tree is glowing very brightly.
You know how much I love my tree, but what do you think of my rainbow ombre Christmas tree? Love it? Hate it? I’d love to hear in the comments!
