Thanksgiving Decor

Good morning! Canadian Thanksgiving has come and gone, but luckily my decor was centered around fall (I did that on purpose) and not too specific to Thanksgiving. I can leave it up until I put out my Christmas decorations if I want, even though it snows way before then (or I'll have to make some winter-y decorations for that in-between period).

These I obviously did not make. I bought these and my niece helped me put them on the window. She was so excited about them, and told me "Auntie, the witch has hair like you!" (I was having a particularly bad hair day). She ripped the one pumpkin a little bit, and had a mini panic attack, but I'm surprised that they all survived coming off the protective sheet. When her mom came to pic her up later that afternoon, she insisted on showing her, and when everyone came for dinner the weekend after, she showed them all what her and auntie did.

I shared this sneak peek on my Instagram.

I then later shared this photo of a little crate full of pumpkins. They're so tiny and adorable! You can find the tutorial for these adorable pumpkins HERE. That link leads you to Craftaholics Anonymous. They have tons of great tutorials and projects over there! The stem/leaf on top, I made using a modified cutfile. I just took a simple leaf shape and welded it onto a rectangle, then folded 1/4"
of the bottom of the rectangle and hot glued it to the top of the pumpkin.

When I started making them, my niece was helping me, and I had set aside pumpkins for her because she asked if she could make "pumpkin, snowmen". I knew what she meant so I made this little pumpkin-man family for her. After this photo was taken I added a mustache to two of them, hair bows to two of them, and one with a mustache got a little bowtie. They're adorable.

I wrapped them up in a Christmas gift bag with a snowman on it, and wrote in an adorable little card I made a few years ago for Valentine's Day (it says I [heart] U on the front). She loved it, and was almost in tears when she came to thank me. It made my heart extremely happy.

Some people do a fancy table set up, but because my family puts all the food on the table, I did a fancy set up on the cabinet beside the TV that has all of our movies in it. I cleaned everything off of it and put the silver candle holders and the blue bottles back up. Then I pulled out and added my fall arrangements (the one on the right is damaged from water getting in the basement). I also made some larger pumpkins and put them onto some candle holders I've had for 3 years, but have yet to find candles I like to put on them. I bought the owl, and the candle at Michael's, in their halloween section.

Here's those pumpkins. What I did was just figured out a pattern, and ran the string between the paper strips (just straight through the center of the pumpkin). I had to adjust a few of them as they smushed together more than I wanted, when I put them up over the window.

I hope this inspires some of you to save some money and make your own fall decorations! I see a lot more garlands in my future. Especially now that I have a sewing machine. For winter, I think I want to make a snowflake one. I'm getting pretty excited for Christmas, I already have a list of things I want to try, not just for the blog, but because we have very few Christmas decorations, and now that work is new and pretty, I'd love to make some pretty things for there as well!

Have a great day!
-Alexandria

Christmas Decorations

This is Jon and I's first Christmas together in our own place. Last year we celebrated at his parents house, and my parent's house. This year we're decorating the house a little bit. Next year we want to tackle hanging Christmas lights outside, and doing more decorating inside (no need to buy everything at once).

The first thing we did was set up the tree, though it took us a few days to get the decorations onto it.

Our tree is sitting by the front door because we had no idea where else to put it aside from in front of the TV, no one liked that idea. (Excuse the mess we had only been home a few minutes).

Here's a close up of the decorations. We went with red, green and gold this year (that was all our store had), and got the star garland from his mom. She bought it a few years ago at the Christmas Farmer's Market they host in town every year in December. She said it was handmade by the lady, and she had 5-6 of them. We managed to get two (they're not very long), to do our tree, and two went to work. They're beautiful and a huge hit with everyone.

We also have the Be Merry banner that I made. It hangs above our TV. I still feel like it needs something more. The wall seems so plain otherwise. Maybe I'll pick up a garland of some sort to string across the top.

We bought two of these garlands and strung one over the window in the kitchen, and one over the window in the living room. It's like having candles lit when we have just them on.

My love of owls has translated into our Christmas decorations (and the edge of our key rack). Here's one of a few owls that we put out for Christmas.

These three hang on the mirror by the front door. The one pictured above is in the bottom corner of the mirror.

These three are hanging on the window on our front door. They're frozen solid (normally they're rubbery and flexible). It's been extremely cold lately.

This is our adorable little own door hanger. He gets squished between the two front doors, but I smile when I come home and see him hanging there.

We even have owls on the table! At first I thought the table looked kind of plain, but I like it. It's cute and winter-y without necessarily being Christmas-y.

We ventured away from the owls and I bought this snowman. It has a space on the back for a tealight. I've been meaning to get a battery operated one because the cat is drawn to lit candles.

I also picked up this Santa one that sits opposite it on top of the cabinet that holds all of our movies (pictures of the house coming in the new year).

I can't wait to decorate the house more next year! I love Christmas.

Hopefully you all have your decorations up by now! Have a wonderful day!

-Alex

DIY Be Merry Banner

I was going through some of my craft stuff that I've barely used and stumbled across my Close To My Heart chipboard letters. I used a couple last year on a project that still isn't finished, but figured I should use more of them. I have limited letters since I bought them from a yardsale, but I used what I had to make a Christmas banner.

I originally wanted to go with "JOY" but didn't have all the letters for it, so I looked through the few I did and realized with some creativity I could do "BE MERRY".

I love our new carpet and I did a lot of my planning for this project on my floor. I went through the letters and chose to do it this way since I had one sheet of each letter but was lucky enough to have two E's that were the same! 

At first I wanted to cover them in patterned paper and hang them on a garland above the TV. That didn't work out the way I wanted it to, so instead I made this. Don't mind the TV, I was watching the M3 Top 20 Countdown. This is just Legacy by Fefe Dobson.

We hung it on the wall using white tacks, and I attached ribbon to each of the rosettes. I'm not tall enough to get a good picture of how we hung them, but if you squint and tilt your head you can see the tacks.

I had Jon take these down so I could get better pictures of them. I attached a scalloped circle in a similar colour to each rosette to keep it together, then put the letter on top of that. Most of our decorations are red or green, so I figured they were a safe colour choice.

The large rosettes were made using three 3" strips of patterned paper. This red one is probably my favourite.

When I cut the striped paper for the little ones I definitely wasn't thinking. The pattern doesn't match up where the strips were connected. I should have cut one strip from each sheet of paper and connected those. These ones were made using two 1 1/2" strips. I used a black scalloped circle so you could see the letter from a distance.

Here's a better look at the green chevron pattern on this one.

I love this red paper so much. The pattern is just perfect, and the colour is a reddish pink.

A closer view of my mismatched pattern. Oh, and I coloured the circles black. They were off white, because I wasn't thinking and it was late when I finished these ones. 

I love Christmas so much. I'm going to spend the next few days trying to wrap presents without using bows and using minimal ribbon. Our cats like to take the bows off the gifts and play with the ornaments on the tree. So far though they've left the tree alone, I'll share a photo of that next week!

Have a wonderful weekend!

-Alex