UPDATE: As it turns out, the lamppost decorations that this project is based on are no longer being used. Starting this year, the new NOS decorations include full-sized masks, French horns, and artificial peacock feathers.

This Christmas decoration was inspired by the lamppost adornments in Disney’s New Orleans Square. No glue is used in its construction, so it can be disassembled and reassembled every year, perhaps with different embellishments each time!

Before you do anything else, settle on a color scheme for the decoration. The one pictured uses Mardi Gras colors (very New Orleans-esque), but at Disneyland, each lamppost is done up differently, so choose whatever look grabs you and collect items appropriately.

Materials and Tools:

Artificial evergreen swag, ~24” long

1 or 2 strings of metallic beads

Wire-on ball ornaments in various sizes

Christmas-themed picks (avoid naturalistic berries and holly leaves—go for glittery stars, gift boxes, drums, etc.)

Ostrich feathers

Miniature Carnival mask or domino mask

Any other goodies that strike your fancy and can be secured to the swag

Floral wire and wire snips (optional depending on ornaments used)

Instructions:

First make sure the swag includes a loop or hook on the back for hanging on a wall, and if it doesn’t have one, make one out of floral wire. (It’s much easier to do this first thing than after the swag is loaded up with glitzy ornaments!)

Wind your beads around the swag. Let loops of them hang loosely off the upper “branches.”

Make clusters of wire-on ball ornaments by twisting the wires together. Vary the sizes and colors in each cluster. Insert the twisted wires all over the swag foliage. If any are loose, wrap the wire around the branches to secure them. The more ornaments, the merrier!

Arrange your remaining items around the top of the swag in a pleasing, balanced way. Stick the ostrich feathers in last of all. If any of the items don’t want to stay put, try adjusting their position or bending the swag branches a little, but resist the temptation to glue them in.

That’s it! You now have a Christmas decoration fit for Queenie herself! Hang it up and listen to some lively jazz covers of Christmas favorites.

My sister Lokotei and I put this together several years ago. Our inspiration was the Mickey-shaped wreaths that adorn Disneyland’s Main Street during the holiday season.

There are a couple of ways you can make your own Mickey wreath. One well-publicized method is to take three wreaths in the proper proportions to each other and attach them together with floral wire and/or hot glue. But if you can’t find three proportionate wreaths, you can use our method, which involves one wreath and one garland. (Whichever method you use, though, make sure the different pieces match! That is, the artificial twigs and needles should all look alike, as though they could be part of the same piece.)

With the wreath-and-garland method, simply bend the end of the garland in a circle, adjust the size to make a good “ear” for your wreath, wire/glue in place, and cut off the rest with heavy-duty wire snips. Then do it again for the other ear. You can also, as we did, attach a loop of floral wire between the ears for easy hanging.

But that’s just the beginning. The real fun part is decorating Mickey! If your goal is to mimic the Main Street wreaths as closely as possible, wind a string of white lights through the wreath (or through the ears, if your main wreath came with lights already installed) and gather a few dozen ball ornaments in red, gold, and green, including both metallic and matte finishes and a few different sizes. Depending upon whether you intend the ornaments to be a permanent part of the wreath or not, either hang them normally with hooks or else run more floral wire through the loops for the hangers and secure them that way. The ornaments should cover the wreath pretty densely, but don’t forget to leave room at the bottom for the bow. Use red flocked ribbon with gold embellishment near the edges. Most craft stores sell devices for the easy construction of multi-looped bows, or you can find instructions online for doing it by hand.

Of course, there’s no reason you have to mimic the Main Street wreaths exactly. Use whatever ornaments you like, or just leave it “naked” like in the photo. Whatever floats your boat. You could even go recursive and hang it with the Mickey-shaped ornaments sold in the parks. In any case, feel free to share your variations on this famous Disneyland decoration!

Gifts of Mara Goblin Keys, inspired by Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye at Disneyland. I primarily used the mural found just inside the entrance to the temple for my guide.

The keys are actually Indian in origin, ordered off of eBay. The beads on the bows are real jade.

The silver Water of Life charms were bought on eBay, independently of one another and not from the same seller, and turned out to be the same charm! The water drop gems are Swarovski crystals.

The Treasure charms were made from freshwater pearls, red Swarovski crystals and a pair of earrings I took apart for the gold coins. I chose to use red gems instead of blue so I would have a greater variation of color.

The Eye of the Future charms were made from lotus charms and silver Eye of Horus pendents that I meticulously cut apart and shaped down to be the shape that I want. I gave the lotuses a light coating of purple nail polish before epoxying the cut eyes to them.

I made this ornament (among many others, yet to be shared) last year, when my entire Christmas decorating theme revolved around Disneyland. Of all the Disneyland-related crafts I’ve posted online, it is by far the most popular—I even used it for my ID photo here on the blog!

Materials and Tools:

3” white foamcore satin ball ornament (Mine came from Gifts By Christine)

1/8” gold wired ribbon

1/4”-1/2” gold ribbon

Gold woven cord

Gold thread

Gold-headed decorative pins

Wire snips

Sequin pins

Assorted gold and silver sequins and confetti pieces

Gold and silver seed beads

Hot glue gun

Instructions:

It’s best to have a good, head-on photo of the clock face to use as a guide while assembling this ornament. Since you will be recreating a flat design on a hemispherical surface, you’ll need to distort it a little and employ curves in places to create the impression of straight lines. I started by tacking down the triangular shape of the “hat” and then adding the nose (1/8” gold wired ribbon) in order to set the proportions for the rest of the face.

The hat and the outer rim of the eyes are defined with gold thread, stretched around sequin pins like chain-link fencing around posts. This is probably the trickiest part of the whole project, requiring a delicate touch and a lot of patience. You might want to insert the pins halfway first, wrap the thread as tightly as possible without weakening it, then push the pins in the rest of the way.

The embellishment on the hat is made of a silver spindle-shaped sequin and two gold confetti spirals. The irises of the eyes are very small flat gold sequins held in place with gold seed beads and sequin pins. The pupils are gold cup sequins secured with gold-headed pins. I used wire snips to trim the pins down to a manageable size for the ball, cutting at an oblique angle in order to keep a point on them.

The mouth is gold woven cord, knotted at both ends (hidden behind the cheeks) in order to keep it from fraying and secured at the bottom of the curve with the tiniest dab of hot glue. The cheeks are silver cup sequins overlaying gold “sunburst” sequins, held in place with sequin pins and silver seed beads. The chin is another silver cup sequin held in place the same way.

So much for the front of the ornament.

The back is a simple collage of shapes that evoke other parts of the Small World exterior. My choices included gold and silver pinwheel and sunburst shapes (available from many sources) as well as various silver cogwheel shapes from Cartwright’s Sequins. A package of “number confetti” provided all ten digits in silver. All shapes are attached with sequin pins in a more-or-less random design.

The hanger for the ornament is simply gold ribbon looped through the plastic hoop at the top and knotted off.