- Claire Douglas
Creative mantle arrangement with pink painted foliage
Updated: Jun 25
Painted floral arrangements are a quick, low cost way to add a temporary pop of colour and create a focal point in a room. The possibilities are endless and only limited by your imagination.
What you will need…
A range of foliage, twigs, leaves and greenery
Paint in your chosen colour(s)
Chicken wire
Wire snips (or strong scissors)
Method of attaching the chicken wire to your chosen wall (this could be, strong double sided tape, command hooks, nails, picture hooks, sticky tabs etc)
After going all out with the Christmas mantle displays last year, January’s bare mantle was just not doing it for me. Where possible, I try to use flowers and foliage from my garden for displays, but in January my garden is pretty much flowerless and my local florists were all sadly closed due to lockdown, so it was time to think outside the box…cue the leftover @decoratingcentreonline tester pots!
I gathered a range of greenery, twigs and foliage from the garden, choosing the sturdiest looking selection so they wouldn’t wilt quickly and would prolong the life of the decoration.
I gave each piece of foliage a coat of one of the shades, DCO295 - (dusky pink), DCO286 (pale pink) & DCO26 (dark grey). I left some of the green showing through on some because I think the pink & green combination is a really pretty one.
Once I was happy with the amount of foliage in each shade I left it all out to dry for a while.
I cut some chicken wire and decided exactly where I wanted it positioned, then attached it to the mantle, it went all the way up to the picture rail on the right hand side (I chose this level because I could hook the chicken wire into the picture rail and secure with a small piece of strong double sided tape, so didn’t need to make any holes in the wall).
Once the paint had dried on the foliage I started threading the stems into the gaps in the chicken wire.
I added more and more foliage until the wire was hidden and I was happy with the shape of the display and voila! It was really simple to make and only took a few hours from start to finish.
To complete the look, I painted the front of the chimney breast under the mantle in the DCO 295 dusky pink too.
