I managed to give the nuclear glow LED fairy lights a little makeover. The intention was to dull down the brightness a bit. I buy 'warm white' LED lights whenever I can, as they are the closest in colour and brightness to traditional fairy lights. It wasn't an option when I bought these. It's so quick and easy to do, if you have some LED* fairy lights that you want to tone down a bit, here's how.
(* I would only do this with LED lights as they don't get too hot and trad fairy lights with bulbs that you can change simply wouldn't work for this)
Buy some silk flowers in a design you like. I chose stocks, but would have been happy with roses had the shop had any.
Make sure the flowers are ones that can be plucked from the stem, then dismantle the plastic centres, keeping the flower petals in order. 
Starting with the largest petals from the back of the flower, push each petal over the light.
Doing it in reverse means the flower will end up the right way, with the smallest petals at the front. 
It's a little fiddly, and takes a bit of gentle pushing, but the hole in the middle of the petals will give enough to go over each light. Once the lights have flowers on them, gently pull forward the petals so they obscure each one. You can see how it just dulls down the brightness from this photo, the light at the top hadn't yet been covered.
A dab of glue could be used, to hold the petals in place, but I haven't bothered. I like that if I change my mind I can easily remove the flowers and have the lights showing again. Here they are before.
And how they look now.
Still throwing out their pretty light, but not quite as bright. I'm going to do this to the second set of lights. They will look even prettier than before when I use them on the dining table as decoration.
Very pleased with how they turned out.
New Year's Eve tomorrow, if you are going out, PLEASE be careful. I tend to sleep through from one year to the next, though I usually wake up when fireworks and cheering start up!
Happy New Year, here's to an excellent 2012.