Decorating for Winter - A Winter Village

Well one of my goals for this month was to decorate for winter. I've been working on ideas here and there, but so far, only one area is completed, and that is the mantel. I actually had this idea in December and completed it just before Christmas. I wanted to do a winter wonderland theme, with snowflakes hanging down just above a little town, all covered in snow. I also wanted to NOT spend a lot of money. :-) So this is kind of my own take on a dept.56 village, but without the expense or having to store it all each year. :-)  It took some ingenuity, but I figured it out.



I created the little town out of posterboard. I just googled some images of "town silhouettes" and then freehanded a design on pieces of white posterboard. Cutting them out was the hardest part because my craft knife is dull, dull, dull. :-) I even cut out little windows and glued vellum onto them so that light would shine through the back. Of course, that was the plan, but I never could find a light that wasn't either too bright, or too small behind the town I created. Oh well. The light shining down from the mantel looks pretty too. I painted glitter faux snow onto the roofs and chimneys of the buildings, and I love how that looks.



The "snow" on the ground in front of the buildings is that faux snow cotton ball stuff. It has sparkly flecks in it that is really pretty. I originally wanted big white cone trees or something like that, but everything I saw in the stores was either too small or too expensive. So I took some picks of white berries that I had in my Christmas decorations and wired them together into trees. I think they look pretty cool.



The snowmen are foam and styrofoam balls hot glued together, and covered in more of that faux snow paint. They don't have eyes or anything because I wanted everything to be white.

The most important part of this whole get up was the snowflakes falling down from heaven. (Or in this case the ceiling above the mantel. What? Doesn't your mantel snow down on everything below? ;-)  The Dollar Store had some great sparkly snowflakes that are light as a feather. They were light enough to hang on invisible thread and attach to the ceiling with some scotch tape. The other little snowflakes are plastic scrapbooking decorations that I have had for ever. They were perfect to vary the size ans scale of the snowflakes. The best part of this little setup is that all the flakes are light enough that they move back and forth in the breezes created by our forced air. It's magical. :-)



So there you have it. My simple and cheap winter display for our mantel. Hopefully I will get around to putting up the other decorations before winter ends. Then again, if spring surprised me and came early - I'm thinking I wouldn't care so much. :-)