Spring Wreath

I am beginning to wonder if Pinterest isn't funded through places like Michael's, AC Moore, Hobby Lobby and Jo-Ann Fabrics.  I feel like anytime I see something cool on there, I am usually ending up at one of these place to do said cool project.  Today was no exception.  Granted, I did want to go to Michael's to get Colin a decent Easter basket, but I didn't NEED to buy the other items until I saw a pin on Spring Wreaths. 

We have a fall wreath, a seashell wreath, and then usually something Christmas-y for the door during December.  I lack other wreaths to fill the front door during the spring and late winter.  I was inspired by this pin (website) for my design.  I still think that one looks a little nicer, but hey, this is wreath number two I have ever made, so I think it came out ok. 

Inspired and ready to go, I headed off to Michael's to buy supplies.  My sad hot glue gun, wires, and pliers were in stock in my closet, but I needed a new wreath ($4), flowers ($5), and some bling ($6).  If I had held out (read - had the patience), this project would have been a bit cheaper, but for a $15 investment, I thought it was worth getting everything at once.  I did save 20% on everything at least (hooray coupon!).

I basically just watched TV and puttered until I got a look I thought was decent.  Then I got the hot glue gun going and starting making it permanent.  After the flowers were in, I placed the butterflies where I thought they would look the best and then added the beads in various spots for sparkle.

Overall I thought it turned out pretty cute.  If I had wanted to spend more on the flowers I am sure it would have changed the nature of the wreath, but not too shabby for $15 and an hour of my time for the end of the weekend.  And now we have something for our door for the spring.  I am sure the neighbors will appreciate a bit of brightness in this dreary wannabe spring weather (currently wintery mix falling from the sky - hooray).

Holiday Sewing Adventures

For as long as I have owned my tree (now going on 5 years) I have always wanted a tree skirt.  I find this kind of odd because I never had one in my house growing up.  We used to make do (and my parents still do) with a white bed sheet that always serves this purpose.  That aside, I thought it would be relatively simple to find one.  The first year I was just happy to have a tree, so I said, "next year."  Since then it has become the running theme.

Most of the ones I do find fit into one of the two categories; Ugly and/or Expensive.  Since I wanted neither of these things I thought I could wait until the after Christmas sale to find one that was at least Used to be Expensive, but pretty.  It never quite worked out that way.  Oh well.  So here we are at year 5 of putting up my tree (which I love) and I decided I had enough hunting with pitiful results. 

The wonderful thing about owning a sewing machine is you can make most anything you need to if you want to. A quick Google search revealed many options for tree skirts.  I was surprised by how many of them still fell into the Ugly category.  I finally found one that was really generic which was perfect.  I am not sure I am really a Sewing 4 Dummies kind of person, but their pattern/instructions was exactly what I wanted.  Nothing too terribly complicated, but ideally spells out all of the things I would need and did some math for me.  I learned the C=2*pi*r, but I really didn't want to figure it out.  Off to the store we went!

I do have to mention we went on Saturday after Black Friday so I was worried the place was still going to be a zoo/really picked over.  They were having a 3 day sale, so the prices were still really good.  So we wandering to the Christmas fabric and started to browse when Rob spotted some pretty awesome fabric.  It was a doubled sided pre-quilted fabric with shimmery red on one side and shimmery green on the other.  The pattern had said that I would need two fabrics to sew together, but with this one, that step was eliminated.  Wohoo!  We located the bias tape we would need and Velcro to keep it closed.  We even went one step further and found some gold bric-a-brac to run along the edge of it.

I am really glad that my grandmother taught my how to sew all those years ago and that it's a skill I have kept in fairly decent use even today.  So assembling this project together took a couple of hours, but that was all.  The finished result looks better than anything sold in the stores (in our opinion) and it was really easy.

So here's the materials needed:
1 1/4 yards of material for each top and bottom - can be the same fabric (2 1/2 yards total) or different ones
6 yards of bias tape
Velcro Strips - found a package of 2 3"inch long pieces
Appropriate thread

We added 12 yards of gold bric-a-brac found in the ribbon aisle.  We had some left over, which is being used in the matching stocking project.  They also mention adding appliques and other embellishments as you see fit.  Anyone who has even limited sewing skills can pull this off.  :)

Total Cost for Project - $22.50 - Thank you sales and coupons!

Deck The Halls

We have paused and given Thanksgiving it's proper recognition and now we can charge onto Christmas*!  And Christmas isn't Christmas without a few sparkles and nick knacks being put up.  It's my tradition to wait until the Friday after Thanksgiving to pull out decorations.  It just seems wrong to do this beforehand, even if there is only one month between the two holidays.  It's bad enough the stores push it, it can wait to come to my house.

I thought it would be a fun idea to put up all the decorations and transform the house while Rob was at work (with his consent), but that didn't exactly happen.  When I was living on my own and decorating my own place, I had everything up in a few hours.  But Rob and I both love this holiday a lot and we have a LOT of decorations.  I am not talking about a couple of boxes.  We take up exactly one entire closet just for the stuff we put out for Christmas.  This equates to six 20 gallon totes, a 7 1/2 foot tree, plus a few paper box style boxes for the over flow that wouldn't fit in the totes.  It's a little overwhelming. 

I woke up on Friday around 10am, got all excited about the day ahead of me and immediately got side tracked by The Hunger Games book.  (Fabulous read btw and thank you Meghann for suggesting it!)  Around 12:30, I decided I need to eat and take a shower.  At 1:30 I figured I would pop in Love Actually and start in on my task for the day.  At 3pm, I still hadn't found all the boxes.  The lights were missing and weren't in the designated closet.  This is when I realized we didn't fit in one closet.  We have some serious issues.  Rob arrived home right around 4pm and found me with half opened boxes, kind of staring around and wondering what to do next.  I unwrapped a good many things I knew we wanted to put out, but I couldn't bring myself to organize them in any sort of fashion.  I did manage to arrange the ceramic Santa's along the mantle above the fire place.  That was my greatest accomplishment. Not exactly the progress I wanted to make.  Truthfully, I was also enjoying being a down right bum. 

Needless to say, I hadn't managed the winter wonderland look I was going for, but felt much better with the idea of reinforcements.  We puttered a bit more and between the two of us got the tree set up properly.  I was having trouble with the lights which seemed to just come on for Rob at the touch of his hands so he fed them to me while I worked them through the branches.  We called it quits and left the ornaments for Saturday.

On Saturday we tinkered with some more decorations and I left the house for the first time in days so we could pick up some books at the library and go to Jo-Ann Fabrics so we could create our own tree skirt.  (Stay tuned for Holiday Sewing Adventures.)  There was still some daylight left after out errands so I decided to put up the outside lights.  Really this is nothing super fancy, just some white lights between the porch rails, but I like it.  This sounds like the simplest task, but I have a way of complicating things to make myself do this twice.  That and I am prone to be a perfectionist.  I started with the lights going straight from my bulb to socket converter with about 7 feet hanging between it and the railing.  I figured I had enough to still do the front of the porch (trying to remember back to how wide my porch was in Atlanta).  I got through all 4 strands before I realized that was way wrong.  So I went back inside, got an extension cord and proceeded to redo the whole thing.  Did I mention that it was about 40 with whipping winds and I seem to misplaced my gloves?  BUT the porch looks fabulous and is brighter than the runway at Dulles.

On Sunday I believe we finally finished putting up everything.  So instead of 5 hours, it took 3 days, but it looks lovely and we were enjoying the process, so who cares?

*For those of you who do not celebrate Christmas, fill in whatever decorating holiday that falls around this time of year that's most appropriate to you.