Mad About Plaid Christmas Mantel

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas around here. I don’t think our house has looked this festive… ever! I am loving this plaid theme that I chose. The plaid patterns coupled with the red and green color scheme are really making things feel extra jolly this year! I am excited to share all our merry decor with you but first we will start with my Mad about Plaid Christmas mantel.

After I decided on the traditional plaid theme for Christmas this year, I had to figure out a way to incorporate the plaid into my mantel. I thought about making some plaid Christmas trees to go on the mantel, but I wanted to do something different that I had not seen before. So I thought, what about instead of putting something on the mantel, I could make a cute backdrop, almost like art pieces.

We already had some stretched canvases from an art project that my sister made for us years ago. We had been saving them around to re-purpose them since they no longer went with the color scheme in our house. I also had some extra fabric around after making my DIY plaid Christmas pillows, so I just cut some pieces of fabric and wrapped them around the canvases.

I love how they resemble presents hanging on the ship lap backdrop. That is probably because I literally wrapped them like presents. I secured the fabric to the back of the canvases with flat push pins. The nice thing is that after Christmas is over, I can still use the fabric and canvases for another project!

Since the plaid pieces are pretty bold on their own, I decided to keep the rest of the mantel simple.

We hung a flocked wreath on top of the “presents” to go along with my flocked Christmas tree that I will be sharing with you soon. Thank goodness for command strips! We used some to hang both the presents and the wreath. We will definitely be using those from now on so I don’t get a bunch more little nail holes in my backdrop like are on there now. Looks like I have some filling to do! 🙂

On each side of the backdrop, I put a couple of these cute little trees that I found at Target. They are the perfect sizes to fill that space.

I wanted to hang my garland a little differently this year as well. I really like it this way! We already had some command hooks on the sides of the mantel that I hung the garland from. I just added another one in the middle to give a couple of swoops in the front.

The base garland is inexpensive pine garland that we have had around for a while so I wanted to bulk it up some. I wound two of the pine garland strands together then added some lights. I was not interested in flocking the garland, so to get the color of the flocked trees to match the garland, I added some lamb’s ear garland.

Instead of adding the lamb’s ear garland as one whole piece, it went a lot further by cutting it into smaller pieces and spacing them out along the garland. I did the same thing with some faux Eucalyptus garland.

The garland was finished off by adding some red berry picks. I love how full the garland looks now! What do you think?

I am also loving how the plaid on the mantel coordinates with my Christmas pillows. And also these DIY plaid fabric reindeer that I shared with you last week. Remember them?

I added the reindeer into a cute vignette on my coffee table. They look fantastic coupled with these DIY cone Christmas trees that I made a couple years ago.

It is so fun to be able to bring out old DIY projects and give them new life again. I found the pretty mercury glass trees at Target this year as well.