Style It / Soft & Romantic Winter Decor

Yikes - just three more sleeps until Christmas Day - are you just about ready? I find it really funny that even though I'd got myself into gear enough with the decor to come up with this DIY garland, nothing else was even close to getting done. Occupational hazard maybe? Needless to say, we pulled our collective fingers out over the weekend and got through a mountain of 'to-dos'. Yep. We owned it. Food, gifts, the lot. Phew.I've been thinking about creating more 'how to style' posts recently. Day to day I don't really think about how I style my work as I just do it, but there are a few guidelines that are worth remembering - would you like me to write more for you?Just for fun, today I'm sharing how to put this look together. Don't panic if you feel that there isn't time now, this isn't just a Christmas look as you can change up the colours throughout the year. You can recreate the look with or without the garland using a shelf, sideboard or even as a table runner (imagine that dressing a table for a New Year's Eve dinner!) I digress...You Will NeedPaper honeycomb balls in a variety of sizes - I chose white, ivory, grey and soft pinkCut glass vases - you can pick these up in a charity shop for peanuts and come in handy for all sorts of projectsHyacinth bulbs or similarSoft pink tall candlesSmall glass votives lined with copper tape✚ Start with arranging the honeycomb balls. You'll need to layer them up slightly if you've enough depth to work with, so that you have some of the middling and smaller sizes towards the front, larger to the back. Cluster them a little so they're not uniform.✚ Introduce your candles. I put mine into a variety of cut glass vases as the glass will pick up the light from the candles and kick out an added glow onto your wall - just beautiful. Play around with height, for example if there's an obvious space that needs something tall and there's a vase that fits, use it. Same applies if there's a shorter vase and a gap at the front. Step back, tweak, step back and tweak some more.✚ Next up, add in your bulbs. I've displayed mine in a mixture of short glass vases and a tumbler for variation in height. See how I've arranged the short one towards the front and the taller further to the back?✚ Add a little interest. I wasn't happy with that little pink ball on it's own at the front, so I put it on top of a little pressed glass cake stand and added in another pink ball to the right. Also towards the back you might spot a glass decanter with silver cuff that I thought would do well to reflect the candlelight.✚ Finally, I placed at the front three small tea light votives that I'd covered with a strip of copper tape each. I liked the way they picked out the soft pink in the candles and garland.Here's a few top tips worth remembering:Odd numbers look better. It's difficult to explain why, but they do - 3 candles, 3 vases, 3 tea lights • Layer up, don't just put things side by side, try in front, behind or stacked on top • Introduce height but allow each object to relate to each other (so nothing too tall that disconnects from the others) • Work with triangles. It sounds odd but objects look more pleasing to the eye when they relate to each other via a triangle. I've used the candles to instigate this and pulled the eye across to the paper balls and down to the votives. See?I hope you found this useful enough to inspire your own styling at home? It was fun to pull an image apart step-by-step and analyse it for a change!I'm signing off for the Christmas holidays now but will be back soon with a rich and gorgeous recipe for hot chocolate before the year is out. Have a wonderful time! x