New Year's Eve Decorating Ideas

Make decorating your home for New Year's Eve party a pleasure instead of a stressful nightmare. Organization and planning helps you keep on top of your New Year's Eve party.

Create a gorgeous party planning notebook with an inexpensive plastic three-ring binder that has a space to insert an inspirational picture. Keep cutouts from magazines of ideas you love about decorating, themes, menus, and recipes. Keep notes about your party afterwards so you remember what worked well and what to do differently next year. Your personal party journal will be an invaluable assistant to help you avoid holiday stress.

New Year's Eve Decorating
Enjoy your home decorating for New Year's Eve. Don't try to do too much. Keep in mind that people love to come to homes decked out in festive array but that it doesn't take a lot of cluttering ornamentation to create a joy filled room. Just a few large decorations can add the desired impact without taking a lot of time to set out. Plus, too many little decorations get lost when you have many people standing around.

Where to decorate for impact:
1. Your front walkway: Greet guests at the entrance with lights surrounding your front door and two large floral arrangements or evergreen trees.

2. Your front door: A large swag of evergreen decorated with nuts, apples, raffia, and ribbon spiced up with cinnamon sticks and cloves makes a different statement than the usual wreath.

3. Your dining table: If you plan a sit-down dinner, avoid tall centerpieces that interfere with guests seeing across the table. White table cloths reflect the light, add a feeling of elegance, and don't interfere with colored china. Bold colors add drama. Have fun with your table decorations.

4. Look up: Because table decorations get in the way, add decorations above archways and doors.

5. Your powder room: Because guests use this room privately, they take the time to look around and notice decorations.

If your TV looks like a black hole in your room when it's off, play an old black and white classic movie with the sound turned off.

Enjoy your New Year's Eve decorating this year. Try some new ideas and keep a party planner for next year. You'll be ready for new holiday decorating ideas!

Copyright © 2006 Jeanette J. Fisher

Elements of Design

ELEMENTS OF DESIGN

Whether you are working with existing furnishings and fabrics or “starting from scratch” with an empty room, you should always use the elements and principles of design as a guide in choosing everything. The elements are your tools or raw materials, much like paints are the basics to a painter. The elements of design include space, line, form, color, and texture. The principles of design relate to how you use these elements and are balance, emphasis, rhythm, proportion and scale, and harmony and unity.

Element #1: Space
Space defines the boundaries and sets the limits on the functional and decorative things you can do. Usually you will not determine the space; instead, you will be faced with the challenge of using the existing space effectively.

Element #2: Line
The lines in a room are second only to color in importance when it comes to setting the overall mood or feeling of a room. The lines of window fashions should support the dominant line of the room. In most situations, the dominant line is straight (vertical, horizontal or diagonal) rather than curved. Your choice of emphasizing the direction of lines will determine the mood you want to create.


Vertical lines add height and dignity, creating a more formal atmosphere. Vertical lines also balance the horizontal lines found in most furniture.

Horizontal lines tend to create a restful, informal feeling. They work well in casual rooms or as relief to the strong verticals of formal rooms.

Diagonal lines attract attention and lead the eye. They can be disturbing unless supported by verticals or opposing diagonals.

Curved lines add a softening effect and keep the room from becoming too stiff. Use curved lines with some restraint to keep the room from becoming too soft and overly feminine.

Element #3: Form
Lines that join together produce the form, or shape, of an object, which in turn impacts the overall feeling of a room. Straight lines create rectangles, square and triangles. Curved lines form circles and ovals. The rectangle is the most popular form and is often the dominant shape in a room. Triangles provide stability and curved shapes soften the contours of objects.

Element #4: Color
More than any other element, color can make a room beautiful. Color can set the mood. It can make a room warmer or cooler, larger or smaller. It can hide unsightly features or call attention to the center of interest. Even with the simplest furnishings, the proper use of color can transform a room.

Element #5: Texture
Texture is playing an increasingly important role in home decorating. Visual texture is a material’s apparent smoothness or roughness. To maintain and enhance a casual feeling, use fabrics that are more heavily textured, nubby or rough visual texture. Smooth, shiny surfaces such as silk, moiré, chintz and silk-like looks support a more formal feeling in a room. Using several levels of complementary textures adds variety and maintains interest. However, it is a good idea to avoid dramatic contrasts in texture.

Christmas Decorating

By Roy Thomsitt

Christmas is such a joyous time of the year full of laughter, love, and plenty of good cheer, but it's also a time for plenty of decorating, both inside and outside the home. Many people feel stressed out and unable to truly enjoy the season with all of the things that need to be done, the shopping, the baking, cleaning, the parties, and of course, decorating the house, and even dread the upcoming Christmas holiday.

Instead of allowing yourself to feel frazzled and out of sorts, here are a few simple ideas to consider that will help make your Christmas decorating a breeze:

Christmas Bows, Bows and More Bows

You can never go wrong with bows and ribbons at Christmas time. Make your own or buy them in packs and be generous in your placement of them. Add bows to the corners of windows and the mantle, on the draperies, the backs of chairs, on candlesticks, on basket handles, the stair railings, within garland, and of course, on the Christmas tree. If you are making your own, choose a ribbon that you can easily open after making your bows so that you can untie and store them flat until next year.

Choosing a Christmas Decoration Color Scheme

Choosing the perfect color scheme for your Christmas decorations is one of the best parts of the entire holiday decorating process. Some people choose to follow one specific theme to unify all of their decorations, while others settle on certain colors to use.

For a truly nostalgic feel, use colors you remember from your childhood Christmases. Perhaps your house was always decorated in silver and blue, or maybe there's a certain special memory you could draw upon to find the perfect colors for your holiday decorating. If you loved candy canes as a child, decorate in all white and red, or maybe you have a favorite quilt or piece of fabric you can use for inspiration.

Just about any type of colors work well for Christmas and if you're hard pressed for ideas, follow the existing theme of your home's color scheme and add a complementary color or two to bring the holiday feeling alive.

Less is More

If you think you need to spend a fortune decorating the inside of your house for Christmas, think again as sometimes less is definitely more. Having a space filled with all different types of decorations and colors is often overwhelming and tends to look cluttered.

Besides the Christmas tree, choose one another focal point in the room, or an adjacent room, to spruce up for the holidays. Add candles to the windows or on the mantle, and instead of adding more decorations to the walls, cover your pictures with pretty wrapping paper that matches your color scheme.

For the outside, place a wreath on your front door along with a festive welcome mat and a few strands of lights strung across the porch, around the front windows, or along the railings. To save money, make or buy an artificial wreath that you can reuse year after year, adding a few extra embellishments to change it's overall look.

Christmas Shopping at Home

You may be pleasantly surprised at what you'll find stored away and long forgotten in the attic or basement, or simply just lying around the house. Once you've settled on a specific color theme of two or three colors to use for decorating, take a trip around the house, from top to bottom, and "borrow" whatever you can find to use to decorate for Christmas. A grouping of candles, special placemats and tablecloths, and figurines or knickknacks can all add to your holiday décor.

You will be welcome at the christmastreesus.com web site to search for your outdoor Christmas lights, real and fake trees, and many other Christmas decor items for your perfect holiday season display.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Roy_Thomsitt

December Store Hours

We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday and weekend.

For the month of December, we change our hours so we can spend more time with our families (and do shopping, and cooking, and celebrating!).

Our hours this month are:
Monday through Saturday 10-6.

We will be closed December 24 and 25.