Alliums are spectacular in your garden during the summer months, but they’re just as beautiful once they dry in the fall! Here’s how to use them to create beautiful dried allium Christmas ornaments that you can use on your tree!
I’ve been fascinated with alliums for quite a few years, but I just got around to planting some of my own this fall. Hopefully next year I’ll have some spectacularly big purple globes in my front gardens if all goes well! I was lucky enough to have a friend give me some pretty amazing dried alliums from her mom’s garden and I thought they made the perfect fall decor. I really didn’t want to have to put them away when Christmas rolled around so I thought I’d repurpose them into some unique Christmas ornaments for my tree! I’m always looking for interesting things to add to my tree every year, and I think this is my favourite idea so far!
This month for our Thrifty Style Team posts, we decided that we’d all do a Christmas-themed idea so we could share some Christmas inspiration with you now, while there’s still plenty of time to actually put these ideas to use! What could be thriftier than reusing something from your garden as decor? Make sure you scroll all the way to the bottom of this post once you’re done reading so you can check out all of the other ideas from the other Thrifty Style Team members!
Supplies Needed for the Dried Allium Christmas Ornaments
You’ll of course need some dried allium flowers to start with. Alliums come in all different sizes, but the best ones for this project are ones that are anywhere from 3-6″ in diameter. Some allium flowers are as big as 12″ across and those might not be great for tucking into your tree, but they could make a pretty amazing tree topper! Something to think about for future years when I’m planting my garden, I think. 🙂
The only other supply that I used is a little bit of gold spray paint. You could also use some spray adhesive and some fine glitter to give your alliums a Christmassy look, but I kept things simple of course.
Believe it or not, I’d never actually purchased gold spray paint before so I needed to do a little bit of research first. It turns out that quite a few of the brands that I usually use for spray paint, have gold spray paints that are actually a little more copper coloured. I went with this brand instead and was really happy with the bright gold color that I got. It was also neat to see that the formula of this paint is specifically mentioned as being safe to use on delicate items such as flowers, so I knew it was right for this project.
Using the Dried Alliums as Christmas Ornaments
I really wanted to keep these alliums mostly natural-looking with just a hint of shine. I sprayed them with two very light coats of gold spray paint, making sure not to cover absolutely everything in the paint. I just wanted them to look like they were kind of dusted with gold.
Here’s how they turned out!
The great thing about these is that they have a big, sturdy stem so you can easily just tuck them right into your tree wherever you want them, and they’ll stay in place just like a floral pick.
Obviously we’re just starting to decorate this first tree we put up, but you can kind of picture the effect here. 🙂
I’m excited to see how these will look tucked into one of our Christmas trees this year one they’re fully decorated. We always try to do two or three so I’ll have to choose which one gets the honour of having the alliums this year. 🙂
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- EASY DIY PERSONALIZED CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS from 2 Bees in a Pod
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.