Holiday Centerpieces

Holiday meals are a wonderful opportunity to take some time and create one of your own. With Fiskars tools the possibilities are endless!

Designer: Kendra McCracken

If you're anything like me, you get excited when you walk through the stores this time of year and see the variety of Christmas trees available to use for table-top decor. The trees made of wood, of all-things-shiny, of the treasures gathered from nature, I love them all. When I was walking through a craft store recently, I found the display of ornaments for tiny trees and I knew they would look adorable on a tree covered in hundreds (literally!) of little leaves punched using the new Fiskars Holly Squeeze Punch.

With all of the patterned papers available, there are endless opportunities to create a tree like this that coordinates beautifully with your colors and style of your decor. While I could have easily found papers to use, I decided I wanted to use fabric. There's something about the texture of fabric that I can't resist when it comes to creating a home decor project. And fortunately, I recently discovered a product that stiffens the fibers of fabric so that it can be punched, just like paper.
If you're going to use fabric as I did, you'll start by preparing your fabric at least 12 hours before you're ready to start punching. You simply saturate your fabric with the fabric stiffener, remove the excess, and leave the fabric lying flat to dry.

Now you're ready to punch. If you chose to use patterned paper, you'll have a head start on the rest of us!  My tree is 16" tall and I started with a brand new box of 400 pins. I used every single one of them and didn't have enough.  So plan to punch lots and lots of leaves.

Next you'll begin pinning your leaves to a floral foam cone. You'll notice I layered my leaves under-over-under-over. This will give you a nice, uniform appearance when you're finished. It helps to set the tree on an overturned bowl as you work so it's elevated, helping keep your rows straight and the lowest row of leaves protected from wear.

When you get to the top of the tree, wrap some ribbon or fabric around the top edge to hide the last row of pins. Add some of those adorable little tiny-tree ornaments using the Fiskars 1/16" hole punch and some jump rings. Top it all off with some Christmas floral picks to dress it up a bit more. Now use those strong new wrist muscles to reach around and pat yourself on the back for getting good value out of that Holly punch!

Designer:  Valerie Salmon
Changing out your table runner is an easy home décor update to instantly bring out the spirit of a season in any room.

With the right tools & supplies, making one to fit your decorating needs is just a few hours away from completion.  The Fiskars rotary cutting tool & self-healing mat make it a cinch to make the straight cuts for this project.

With the rotary cutter, cut five 13” x 13” squares and approximately 152” of contrasting 2-inch wide border.  Cut a 13” x 65” of fabric lining for underside of the runner.  Stitch the squares together in one row & pin together with the lining. 

Sew the 2” border around the whole outline of the runner.  Press all seams with an iron.  Stitch down the border to the top of the runner, folding down 1/4” of the raw edges.  Use an iron to keep folds crisp & use pins generously to avoid shifting of fabric. 

Designer: Kelly Purkey
I love adding a little sparkle to my life and knew that I wanted to have a sparkly centerpiece for my table this Christmas. 

I created my own centerpiece that houses a candle by cutting out the bottom of a thin plastic bowl.  The bowl was then flipped upside down and embellished.  I used the large and extra large Cameo Appearance squeeze punches to punch out a bunch of ovals from plain cardstock.  These were then layered and adhered to the outside of the bowl.

Once I had all of my layers of punched pieces in place, I added some fun bling to the centerpiece with sliver metallic spray paint.  I punched out some separate pieces of cardstock to use as "holly" accents.  These were covered with a thin coat of glue, then sprinkled with silver glitter.  I adhered the hollys in groups of two around the centerpiece and added three red Li'l Davis buttons.  The final touch was a candle in the middle. 

Feel free to use a styrafoam ring or smaller bowl depending on the size of your candle. It's going to add a bit of fun and a lot of glamour to my table this year!

By Fiskars design team