During the run up to Christmas, we have been very busy in the art department creating decorations to help brighten up our centre and get us in the festive spirit.

The first project that we work on was the creation of some giant candy canes. These were created from large cardboard tubes, cardboard, paper mache, paint and tape.

Next, in keeping with the candy theme, we made some festive lollipops. These were simply two paper plates, painted with red swirls, taped together, placed on top of a stick covered with red and white tape and finished off with some cellophane wrap and ribbon.

Another project that we decided to try our hand at was inspired by images that we had seen on Pinterest of chalk drawings of christmas trees.

Firstly we took a large sheet of 8ft x 4ft chipboard, painted it red, drew on the tree with chalk, drilled holes in the board and popped battery operated lights through them.

We then pieced all of these elements together to create our very own winter wonderland. We used our white trees, once again, and hung some red love hearts from the branches.

We noticed that this creation was very similar to a quote from one of our favourite Christmas movies, ‘Elf’.

Another Pinterest inspired project that we created was the up-cycling of an old, thin, miserable looking Christmas tree into a bright and shiny new snowman tree.

“A few of us worked together to create this Christmas tree snowman. I think it is very nice. He is made out of wrapping, an old tree, foil, old boots, twigs and bits of card and paper. I helped pack some bags with newspaper for his belly. I am also a receptionist in the centre and the snowman tree is out in that area. I get to see people’s reactions to it. Most of them have never seen a snowman Christmas tree and it brightens up their day and puts a smile on their face.” – Alan McCarty

Recently, we joined a brilliant organisation called Recreate and a lot of the materials that we used to create our Christmas projects came from them.

 

© 2015 HSE/EVE