The thing that I love most about Christmas is the lights. The twinkling fairy lights on the tree, homes lit up with sparkly displays and town centres adorned with colourful Christmas lights. It makes the whole festive season feel all the more magical to me and I especially love going Christmas shopping at dusk just after it has rained because the wet pavement reflects the lights, making the world sparkly and hazy. I love it and you can probably guess that I’ve already been shopping for more Christmas lights this year, because today I want to share a little DIY sideboard display with you using my brand new fairy lights from Homebase.
I happened to be in Homebase on the day before the launch of their Christmas range and everything in store was 15% off, so even though I’d only popped in for some paint to finish off my bathroom makeover, I couldn’t help browsing the festive section and fell in love with these fairy lights. I’ve never chosen icicle lights before, but these ones had such tiny LED bulbs that they looked super-cute, like a flock (or should that be flight?) of fairies and the idea for this DIY project lightbulbed above my head.
I gathered together a bunch of empty jam jars, Kilner jars and some decorated jars that I’ve saved from last years project (check out my snow/glitter tea-light jars project to get this look for yourself) and I arranged them along the length of my sideboard. I then tucked every other icicle strand into the jars and laid the remaining light strands around the base of the jars. I think the 120 twinkles of light look like fairies caught in jars – although they are free to fly away if they want to, there are no lids! This would work equally well down the center of a dining table too or on a smaller-scale on your dressing table to bring a little festive sparkle into the bedroom.
These icicle lights have lots of different settings so although I’ve got them all on here, I prefer to set them to a candle-like flicker or a slow-wave and that now I barely notice when the lights change so they don’t become annoying in my peripheral vision. The warm white shade bathes the room in a cosy glow and is enough festive decoration for the room even without a Christmas tree, so might be a good display for a kitchen sideboard where you might night not have any other decorations. Here’s my little Instagram video of the lights in action, plus an early playing of White Christmas in the background to get me in the mood!
Doing a little DIY Christmas project today with my new fairy lights
