I’ll be honest and say, I’m not a huge fan of outdoor Christmas home-illuminations!  Yes, sometimes you see some gorgeous efforts – a beautifully lit tree in a front garden, or some little tasteful icicles adorning a gutter – but so often, they’re really really naff!

This little home-made decoration is my concession to fairy lights around the front door, and hangs in the tall thin window which we have just to the side.  I think it’s really lovely, festive and welcoming, don’t you?

It was so quick to make, out of a small piece of left-over silver organza, and a cheap string of LED Christmas lights, so I thought I’d share it with you lot.  You can easily adapt the idea to fit any window or door which particularly needs a bit of sparkle!

Construction is very simple, it’s just a tube, closed at the top, and open at the bottom.  My fabric was too wide and not long enough, so there’s a join in the middle – this isn’t a problem! The open bottom needs to be hemmed, but nothing else does. I think the seams add a nice additional texture in the way the lights play on the fabric, so I didn’t make any effort to cut them really narrow or press them flat.  This is the reason I’ve left the long seam in the middle of the decoration, too, rather than trying to hide it away to one side.

The wire for the lights goes in at the bottom (conveniently, your plug socket is likely to be down there somewhere!), and loops over a  few stitches up in the top of the tube before hanging back down again.  If you’re making this for a wider window, you could have two or three of these supporting clusters of stitches, and loop the lights over each in turn.  Finally, there’s a little loop right at the top to hang the decoration from.

I used my sewing machine, but it’s simple enough that you could easily run it up by hand if you don’t have convenient access to one.  This is what it looks like from indoors, it makes a lovely addition to the doorway from both sides, I think!

This is likely to be our only real decoration until we get the tree in a week or two – but it gives us an exciting promise of sparkly pretty things to come!

I’m trying to write a post a day during Advent, so, please come along with me while I try to Blog Advent – the Country Skills Way – and forgive me if I don’t quite manage it!

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