Much Glitter; Little Sewing

I'm trying to get this post up at a reasonable time, so I'm typing it up ahead of time. If you're reading this on Sunday afternoon I"m back at the Festival shop working on another Christmas tree. It's been a fairly busy week. Our team is now about a third of the way through the needed items at this point.

We're all about to start traveling though, so it's good that we got this great head start. Productivity is about to tank for a month or so. Here's the sneaky peak collage of non descriptive close ups.

In case you're wondering why I'm not sharing the full photos, we don't want our designs copied until after our local Festival of Trees is over. So I'm only sharing glimpses. I plan on sharing some of my favorites once everything's been purchased and delivered.

I've been asked before how long it takes to build one of our trees. Well it depends on the tree and the type of elements we've chosen. As examples, here are some trees from last year:

This whimsical 2.5 foot tree took about 3 hours or so. That includes adding extra lights to the tree (there are rarely enough on pre-lit trees) and wiring all the ornaments in place. This tree didn't use much in the way of floral picks or stems though. Only the top really has them.

My Pinwheel tree (that I made for myself) on the other hand contains quite a bit of floral elements, so that can add another hour or two, if you're creating your own units like I do. (As an aside, both of these 2.5 foot trees were my own design. I wanted to show an example of how one designer can work comfortably with different themes and structure too.)

Building units like this not only means you have to figure out how you want it to look, but you have to wire all the pieces together and wrap them in floral tape.

If you're working alone, this process gets time consuming. And the bigger the tree, the more elements you need. Even in a group with everyone pitching in it takes time.

One of the trees we just finished this year is 4.5 feet tall and took over 5 hours to decorate because we used 5 different floral elements. And there were four of us working together that evening. A similar tree to the one I just described could look like this:

And then the 7.5 foot trees take 5-6 people and take an entire late morning to early evening to build. 

That one wasn't too bad, but it was light on the florals.  I will say that any floral heavy tree design for a 7.5 foot tree has their floral units made well ahead of when we come together to decorate, sometimes with wine and cookies. Otherwise we'd never get home to sleep! It's taken us 8+ hours to do a floral heavy 7.5 tree before. But the results are stunning!

That's all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this look at some of last year's trees. We're not just decorating Christmas trees. We're making works of art (to a variety of tastes) and the proceeds benefit children in our community. We're also having an absolute blast doing it too!