Christmas decorations...

 Christmas has come and gone... and I can hardly believe it will be 2014 next week! Time has been flying by for us over here.

I didn't do anything to grand for decorations this year. I honestly wasn't sure we would even be able to fit a tree in this space since we have the baby living in the living room. It's been a little tight but we worked it out.

Last year when I pulled out all my decorations for the tree I realized that I really didn't like what I had. When we were first married I wanted to do all red and silver ornaments, so that is what I had. I've since changed my mind and style and when I went to pack up all the tree décor last year I got rid of all my red. All of it! No more red over here! I wasn't able to get done all the new stuff that I wanted too, but I was so much happier with my tree!

I wrapped the tree in burlap this year for the garland. We also picked up some green bulbs (to replace the red ones I got rid of). I had a bunch of "snow" covered pine cones from my wedding reception as well as silver ceramic snowflakes that I've held onto all these years.

I really wanted to make a new tree skirt similar to this one. But alas, I waited way too long to get it started and only had leaves on the front of the skirt. So I just used presents to cover the rest and decided to just put it on the back burner until Christmas was over. The plan is to finish it up before I put it away so that next year I can pull it out and it will be ready to go.

New ornaments that I added were our family picture ornaments, some little bird houses that I painted with a cracked paint affect...

Some twiggy snowflakes (tutorial found here)...

And my favorite are these itty bitty doilies that I found at this shop. I bought a pack of 50 and starched them. They look so great! Like tiny snowflakes all over the tree. I'm tempted to buy another set for next year, or maybe the next size up... so cute!

We still have random ornaments that get collected with time. I'm so much happier with the tree now though! Maybe a few more days until we take it all down...

Family picture ornaments...

 I like to have a family picture taken every year of my little family. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, most of the time we just have a friend snap a few pictures with my point and shoot camera. Just something, with all of us looking reasonably presentable, in the same picture... once a year. Not too bad right? We've been able to do it ever since Blue was 2 months old, and I love looking at how we have all changed a little over the years. I've been trying to find a way to display them around Christmas time since I haven't been the best at getting cute Christmas cards made every year. I thought it might be fun to make ornaments for our tree out of the pictures so that we can pull them out and look at them every year.

They were pretty simple to make! This is by no means a tutorial, but here are the supplies that I used:

 

I found some wooden rectangles at Hobby Lobby (4 in the pack for $1.49) and printed out wallet sized pictures (I had to get two of each... so now I have lots of extras!). I stained the wood because I love the whole darker wood look, and just mod podged the pictures onto the wooden tags. I then drilled a small hole in the top and laced some bakers twine to hang them from.

I wanted to use my wood burning tool to put the year of the photo on the back but it wasn't working so well. I ended up using a white paint pen and just writing the year on each one.

I have to say I LOVE how they turned out!!!

 

Here is our shot from this year. Can you believe this gorgeous "forest" is just two blocks away from our house? 

 

Easy project that didn't take very much time that I will treasure. I'm still working on getting my tree all decorated, but it makes me so happy to see these when I walk past the tree.

Christmas...

 

We had a good Christmas this year. It's always nice to be home with your family at Christmas time, and this was our second Christmas that we have been home since we moved back. It's been good to visit with aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents, friends. Our lives have been very full this month.

 

Christmas Eve morning the boy woke up with stomach flu. So we had to cancel our plans for our traditional fondu dinner and we spent the day washing every piece of bedding in the house (yes, he managed to puke on both of our beds...). Thankfully we found a laundry mat that was open and we could get the quilts washed and ready to go. Then husband had to work on Christmas Eve night. He actually volunteered to work the grave shift that night so that one of his fellow nurses could be home with her 3 kids on Christmas Eve. I'm glad he is so giving and willing to do stuff like that, but at the same time we missed him. The boy and I snuggled on the couch most of the night watching redbox movies and looking at the beautiful snow outside.

 

I feel like I spent so much time working on Christmas presents this year but I really didn't. Part of that is because I put together the presents that my mom gave to me and my sisters (more on that later), and the gifts that I was planning on giving to my friends didn't work out at all. I spent a lot of time trying to make these darling ornaments that I found only to have them all end up in the garbage. It was super frustrating. I could never get the dough to not crack and look awful.

 

I was successful at making a few growth charts for friends and family. These are the two different types that I made.

They turned out super cute! I love giving handmade gifts at Christmas, I just wish that all my efforts would have turned out better this year. Oh well... that's the game of crafting, sometimes things turn out cute and sometimes they don't!

The boy was happy with his lot this year. His two favorite gifts...

A whoopie cushion from the dollar store and a Spiderman costume that I found at the DI for $4. If I had known these two things would have made him so happy I could have stopped there!!

Wooden advent calendar...

 I've been wanting to make an advent calendar for the boy for a few years now. So I've been keeping my eye out for some good ideas, there are so many cute ones out there! But none of them were exactly what I was looking for. So I combined a few different ideas and came up with this wooden tree advent calendar.

I used this tutorial as my guide for the wooden tree. We used the sticks that fenced off our garden this summer for all the branches. Then I got some match boxes (I found them at Smith's) for each day. With all the extra matches I made some of these.

I would have loved to have covered them all in brown craft paper, but my husband said that was too boring. So I found some other fun paper at Michael's. I went with a stripe and some holly berries.

To hang them on the branches I got some fishing line and poked two little holes in the top of the smaller box with a quilting needle. Then I looped the fishing line inside.

Instead of tying them I just put a dab of hot glue to hold the line in place and snipped off the ends.
This worked perfectly!

Sorry, no pictures of actually putting the branches together. I sawed them using a jigsaw and sanded down the edges so that they were smooth. I tried to leave some of the edges that have been weathered outside for a more rustic look. I found this perfect star at Target. Such a good find! And then I glued it on the tree crooked... so I'll have to fix that later.

The tutorial for the tree says to use string to hold all the pieces together. We used an unbent metal hanger instead. This way we can bend it around so that the tree lays fairly flat. Plus it gave us a loop at the top to hang the tree on the wall.

I used number stamps to put the dates on all the boxes. I also decorated some of the boxes. Not all of them, but some got a special little trinket on the outside. Here are some of my favorites...

There is our lovely advent calendar. I'm so excited to start using it tomorrow! The boy is even more excited. I want to focus on making memories this season instead of just getting "stuff". So inside each box I'm going to put an activity that we can do for that day. To get the slip of paper out you just slide the box like this.

 

 

Here are a few things we are going to be putting in the boxes this year:

 

 - See the lights at Temple Square

 - Make a gingerbread house (or graham cracker house)

 - Drive around and look at the lights

 - Watch a Christmas movie together

 - Have a campout in the living room and sleep by the twinkling tree

 - Make a Santa Claus craft

 - Build a snowman

 - Make ornaments to put on our tree

 - Go to the church Christmas party

 - Go visit Santa Claus

 - Write a letter to Santa and put it in the mail

 - Make reindeer pancakes

 - Make a nativity scene

 - Get dad a present

 - Go to our family Christmas party

 - Have flaming snowballs (more on this when we do it)

 

I have a few more things to come up with but I'm sure I'll think of something!

 

 



My Christmas Card...

This is my cute little family. I don't like to send out Christmas cards, so I don't. But I do like to take at least one picture a year of my family, trying to look cute, to give to the grandma's. I also like having a picture every year so that we can see how we've grown and what we look like.

I love the one that I got this year. In front of an old wooden cabin with a rock fireplace. Darling. And my boy who still lets his mom hold him... even more darling.


I hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas today! Mine was spent surrounded by family and those that I love. I'm a lucky blessed girl.