Add a little "bling" to your holiday decorating with some vintage and upcycled materials

I just love to add a little bling and glitter to my holiday decorating and here's a few projects that I created to decorate my home for Christmas. I have a collection of old rhinestone brooches and earrings that I rarely get a chance to wear and just hate to keep packed up in a box ... so I quite often "add" them to my home decorating projects ... such as this candle that sits on a vintage plate in the kitchen. I added two velvet ribbons to the candle by using short straight pins to hold the ribbons in place at the back. Then I attached the brooch by sticking the brooch pin directly into the candle ... I added another long straight pin to balance the brooch and keep it in place. It's so simple yet elegant!

This next project is a vintage crystal Christmas ornament that I have been making for a couple of years. It was featured in Somerset Studio's GreenCraft magazine (Autumn 2010). I use vintage crystals, ribbons and lace, vintage buttons and rhinestone earrings to create these ... and because most of my supplies are often one-of-a-kind, I rarely make two of these ornaments the same ... so they are kinda of like bling snowflakes!

Here's how to make these ...

I start with two vintage crystals ... one large tear drop and one smaller ... you will need to remove all of the antique metal pieces if there are any. Then add long head pins as shown above. I add one head pin to the top of the smaller crystal for hanging then I make and attach a jump ring to the bottom so I can link it to the tear drop crystal. The wire on the tear drop crystal is left long and I use my pliers to twist the end of the pin into a circle so I can attach the jump ring at the top.

You can see how the crystals have been joined in the photo above ... now it it time to pick out other elements to attach to the ornament and as well as ribbon and lace. I am using one of my vintage rhinestone clipback earrings on this ornament ...

First I tie some ribbons and lace that I selected to go with the rhinestone earring onto the long head pin ... 

... and then I add the clip back earring to the lace. That's it ... again, another simple but pretty way to add a little bling to your holiday decorating!

One last project to add a little bling to your holiday decorating ... 

This is a great project to use up some of those old frames that are the wrong colour or just don't match your decor anymore. I painted mine all the same warm white and took out the glass. Then I used scrapbook papers with glitter, chipboard letters and a couple of wooden letters that I had lying around to make this for our fireplace mantle. I always seem to be picking up letters that are in our names so when I found the "e" and the "r" in my box of supplies, I decided to spell out "be merry" but you could say whatever you want. If you have larger frames you may want to add more letters to a frame ... my frames were all on the small side.

You can paint the letters or do what I did and decorated them with different scrapbook papers. I used modge podge to attach the papers to the letters and then used distressing inks to edge all of the letters. After that each letter was treated differently ... I added glitter to a few, silver beads to one and Inkssentials glossy accents to a couple of others. You can add as much glitter and bling as you want to this project ... make it as simple or detailed as you wish!

I hope that I have you thinking about how you can add a little bling and a little sparkle to your holiday decorating! Have a great week!