Christmas Decorating Ideas

For your Christmas table centerpiece, what could be easier than a bunch of glorious red carnations? All you need is to group them in the hand, and with the aid of four aspidistra leaves, create an exciting contemporary design in a square cube container that is so easy to find. What I'm going to do is take the carnations and if you want them to open up, this is a fine example, blow on them and with your hand, gently tease out the petals to get them to full, big shape. I'm going to put these together into a gentle dome.

The steps are going to be cut quite short, but this design, because of their lasting qualities, this will last for weeks. Carnations are often misunderstood. They're treated as not a very special flower.

But when they are arranged so they are a mass of color, form and texture, they really are exciting and a lovely flower to use. Look at the glorious texture there. So put one there, and one around there, just a little bit.

I've prepared a length of florist tape, with which I am going to bind my carnations together. I am trying to build it up so that the volume of the carnations is more or less equal to the cube vase that I am using. You can make this smaller with fewer carnations, or a really big giant one with more flowers.

There we go, is that right? I think that's about what I want. So we've used only about twelve carnations. I take the tape and I bind it round the stems like that a few times.

Now, I'm going to cut these perilously short. I've place an aspidistra leaf, I've cut off the hard stem and just coiled the leaf around the inside and filled it with water. Flowers always need lots of water to drink.

Now, I'm going to cut the stems off this so that the heads rest on the side of the container. I said it was going to be short. Then you're just going to place them, like that, over the rim of the container.

I dispose of the stems and then with the aspidistra, I'm going to show a technique that creates a coil of leaves and forms just like this. I take one aspidistra and I place the back of the leaf towards me. I take the top of the leaf so it's level with the stem.

I am then going to cut it so that it's easy to pierce through the leaf. Bend the stem over and back and through the leaf like that. So I've created a completely different form.

Because the aspidistra leaf is very thick and tough, it's not going to affect its life. I'm then going to thread one down the other to create that interesting form. If I wanted, I could take another piece of tape and secure that in place, but it's not really necessary.

Cut the stem off and place it in there so you've got rather an exciting contemporary Christmas design. Three down the table, with night lights is just a wonderful way to create a festive Christmas table piece that will last and be so easy. If you wish, you can take some baubles and just place the baubles in any space remaining so you have got a festive Christmas effect. .