Those big round plastic Christmas ball ornaments from Dollar Tree

I have bought and used these big plastic ball ornaments ‘as is’ here and there in the past when we had our brick and mortar store.  They are great to add to color theme decorated trees for added interest, in moderation.  I’d say no more than three of them on an average size Christmas tree.

Or tie some curly ribbon to a few and scatter them about your Christmas dinner table as decorations.  OR tie on little name tags and use them as place cards.  We used them for outdoor decorations at our store, hanging them from the Dollar Tree pine rope garland (the single strand kind w/o any branches).  I don’t have any pictures, but they looked quite nice hanging along the ENTIRE front of the building.  It was in a strip mall, and we were in about the center of a 7 store strip.  Thought it would look cheesy to ONLY decorate our tiny store front, so we bought enough to do the entire strip.

They packed away and kept well for several years of use.  Now that we don’t have the store, what to do with the leftover decorations?!?!  Most of them we donated.  I saves a few of the balls and prettied them up:

These are the big ‘softball size’ ones.  I covered them with strips of vintage sheet music, then mica flakes.

Leaving the plastic tag loop made them easier to work with.  After I put the mica flakes on, I used an opened up paper clip through that loop to hang them to dry.

I also had some metal stars leftover from last year; purchased after Christmas on clearance:

You have to look very carefully at PAINTED items like this.  Oftentimes the paint is RAISED, and therefore the design will still show though when repainted.  Luckily these were nice and flat.

Last year I papered a few of them with vintage sheet music then added the mica flakes; and displayed them with some ‘seed bead’ ornaments.

I had ‘started’ working on some more of them last year, and spray painted them gold and silver.  Dug them out this year and just added mica flakes.

Didn’t want them to be TOO ‘matchy-matchy’ to the balls!

I also found a few smaller balls.  I think they were from a set of assorted blues/aquas and I just didn’t care for this particular color.  Not that it’s a BAD color, it was just more ‘ice blue’ than aqua and didn’t work with my color scheme.  So I covered them with the sheet music strips and mica flakes also.

The small balls have silver tops and the bigger ones have gold.  I decided to see how it might look to just mix them all together with the silver and gold stars.  Not bad actually!

I still want to tie some pretty bows through the hanger loop on the ornaments.  Still pondering whether or not I need to do anything more to the stars. . . .

Will price them individually and put them in a big bowl or tray; for sale in one of my antique mall booths.

I know it USED to be a real ‘no-no’ in the decorating and fashion worlds.  And I don’t think I’d ever put just ONE big silver adornment with an otherwise gold room (or outfit!).  But I really am liking this particular mixture of a little of each!  Maybe it’s because the mica flakes on everything helps tie it all together visually?  

What do you think about decorating with gold and silver like this?