Christmas at my house

I’d be a bad blogger if I didn’t share my Christmas decorating with you. There’s a lot of pressure with this blogging gig! ;-) I’ve seen so many beautiful decorations as I’ve been making the blog rounds over the last month. I hope my decorations live up to the standards!

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the tree in our family room is decorated in purple & silver with some blue mixed in for good measure :-) And it’s covered with snowflake ornaments. I cut back on the ornaments this year, because they were getting a bit out of control. Even with cutting back, it’s till pretty loaded!

 

I decided I wanted to do something different to top the tree. I picked up these silver thingies at Pier 1 last year, and they worked out great.

Some ornament close-ups…

  

I try not to think about how long it took me to make this tree skirt. A friend of mine made one too, and she helped me with the sewing – I honestly have no idea how to set up a sewing machine. That was actually the easy part – the hard part was making the beaded snowflakes. Each one was handmade, which was incredibly tedious. It took over three months to finish this sucker.

 

I couldn’t convince hubby that we really need a white pre-lit Christmas tree too. We finally compromised and picked one up off Ebay for $66.00. It’s kinda Charlie Brown-ish, but hey, I’m not going to complain! I’ll probably come up with a colour scheme for it next year, but for this year, I’m just using ornaments that I already have (with a few from the Dollar Store mixed in!)

  

A while back, I came across a craft project for making your own glass ornaments. You take clear glass ornament, remove the cap, and pour paint inside. Swirl it around, sit it upside down to let the extra paint drip out, and voila!

And I picked up these cute beachy ornaments on our trip to Nove Scotia in August:

Of course, Santa has to make an appearance! My mom made this cute Santa ceramic ornament years ago…

 

I painted this Santa about 15 years ago. Unfortunately, a knot has come through Santa’s beard. I try to look at it as adding character :-)

I love my ceramic tree that my mom made :-)

A few months ago, Sue at The Zhush posted a pic of her living room with the coolest silver balloon dog on the fireplace mantel. I tracked it down online at Anima Causa Boutique, and hubby bought it for me for my birthday :-) Thanks hubs! xo

I hung snowflake ornaments and green balls from the chandelier in the dining room.

 

I added some little felt snowflakes to my bowl of glass floats on the dining room table…

 

This silver ornament wreath was a great find at Pier 1 last year.

It needed some jazzing up, so I added some small purple & turquoise balls and green garland, and hung some big feather ornaments that are too big for the white tree. I was going to add a bow made with peacock ribbon, but I think that might be too much.

 

 

The mantel needs some re-working, but here it is for now:

And of course, Christmas isn’t Christmas without Christmas cookies! I found these Pretty Patchwork Mitten Cookies cookies on the Better Homes & Gardens web site:

Well, mine didn’t turn out quite so pretty. And they didn’t turn out to be mittens either. I decided to make these two days before our annual Christmas baking marathon, and couldn’t find a mitten cookie cutter anywhere. So I made stockings & snowflakes instead. I thought I was using the right pretty pastel colour dyes – maybe I used too much dye? Anyway, here’s my rendition:

Don’t make these unless you have a LOT of time and patience! They’re fun to make at first, but then they get tedious. Good thing I had some assistants to help me out (thanks CL and Emily!)

So that’s my house dressed up for Christmas. As you can see, I don’t have one particular theme or colour scheme – maybe next year!

Ho, Ho, Ho!