Christmas decorating on a budget? Here are a few tips on how to do so from Shayla Copas of Little Rock, whose work is featured on the cover as well as inside Christmas at Designers' Homes Across America by Katharine Kaye McMillan and Patricia Hart McMillan.
RELATED ARTICLES
http://www.arkansas…">Christmas by the book http://www.arkansas…">Mesh is so last year
Go for looks, rather than cost.
"Not everything has to be over-the-top expensive. It can be elegant. But it does not have to be over-the-top expensive," Copas says. "It's the beauty of the product; it's not how much it costs. And sometimes we can get wrapped up into, 'Well, I want all of these ornaments to be glass ornaments of a certain type or a certain brand.' And they break.
"But then sometimes we say, 'OK, I'm going to have a case of glass ornaments ... a case of this style of glass ornaments, or a case of the rhinestone ornaments. And then I'm going to mix them in with the other ornaments.'"
Mix artificial with live greenery.
"I love to use a very thick artificial garland, but then I love to add live in with it" -- for example, some Western Cedar or magnolia-tree branches, Copas says. "People can hardly even notice that you have the artificial [greenery] underneath it." The artificial base adds body to the live overlay.
Combine smaller, cheaper Christmas decorations with larger and more expensive ones.
The smaller decorations can be placed in bunches of four or five, combined with a pipe cleaner -- and "all of a sudden they have a large presence to them," Copas says. For her clients, "we'll purchase some really neat, more expensive ornaments ... and then we'll fill in by doing those groupings. And you just get that punch with it."
Buy a few new pieces of decor each year.
"Some of my clients will start off with a base, and then they'll say, 'We'll want to add more next year,' and then we add and add and add," Copas says. "They want something beautiful, but they don't want to spend it all at one time."
HomeStyle on 11/26/2016