And....We're Back!

What? You didn't know I was out of town for the past 12 days? :P

Thank goodness I had enough holiday projects that I could line up some scheduled blog posts, since I never like to announce on here when I'll be out of town. But we had a great trip in central Washington State, spending Christmas with my in-laws.

I hardly took any photos the whole trip. Mainly it was a lot of waking up early due to the time zone difference, working almost every day, staying up late to try to get myself switched over to Pacific time, lather, rinse, repeat. It was only about the last two days of our trip that I finally got used to the time difference, and now I'm back home, and have to switch times all over again. Let me tell you, jet lag is a bitch.

But one of the highlights of our trip, other than seeing family, friends, and playing with our friend's kitten, was on our flight from Dallas to Seattle. I grew up with a view of Mount Rainier, but have never, ever gotten to fly as close as we did on our flight there. Or else I have, but the view has always been obstructed by clouds and rain. It was a magically clear day for once, so I made good use of the opportunity to snap a few photos out the window!

Sigh, so pretty! But that doesn't mean I'd ever want to move back to Washington, since a clear day like we saw out our airplane window only happens a couple of times each month. On our way back through the Seattle airport it was grey and rainy, as is typical.

Now that we're back, we've both had to hit the ground running, even though we're pretty exhausted. Work deadlines and all that. Luckily it's a short week for us both this week and next week. I'm hoping now to have more time to catch up on things in blog-land, and to finish out WEverb11. Maybe over the long weekend I'll get some things done, like clean up all of the messes the kitties left for us when we were gone.

This is what I get for leaving wrapping paper, and boxes with packing material on the floor. They've gotten their revenge for us leaving them alone over Christmas!

(This is just one room, but basically the whole upstairs of our house has little bits of packing material everywhere. Guess the kitties made their version of Christmas snow!)

So I need to clean. And go grocery shopping. And do a million other things this weekend. Or maybe I'll just sleep. 'Cause jet lag is lame.

Did you have a good Christmas? Got any big plans this weekend?

Fail Scarf and Felt Picture Frame Ornament

Wait, isn't Christmas over? I bet you thought I was done with holiday posts!

Almost, but there's one post I've been saving for after Christmas, because it's one part describing a gift I was attempting to DIY (that was a complete fail), and the replacement gift I DIY'd instead. I had to wait until after my mom opened the gift to show you all!

OK, first the failure. This was something I'd pinned on Pinterest, from Martha Stewart. A no-knit scarf! Which I thought would make perfect DIY Christmas gifts. I was gonna make one for everyone!

Source

We already know this didn't end well. But here are a few of the progress shots.

Once I'd gotten to the end of my strands of 140 inch yarn, as Martha's tutorial had told me to measure out, I was confused. My scarf was only about half of the length it should be! Definitely not long enough to wrap around my neck twice, as is pictured, not even long enough to wrap it around once!

So...fail.

I wasn't ready to give up though. I decided to try again with much, much longer strands. But I knew this project was going to take forever now, and so I thought I'd only make one for my mom, and not for a bunch of people. And I decided to try to make it wider this time too, since it was a little sparse feeling the first go around.

The only problem was, I couldn't find quite as bulky of weight yarn this time, but I decided to make do with medium weight fuzzy yarn instead. 

It was at this point, about 5 hours in, and only maybe a quarter or a third of the length complete, that I decided to do an assessment. It was looking just alright. Not super cute and awesome, as I'd hoped. And then I grabbed the end, to try to put it around my neck to check the length, when I realized what it was actually going to look like while wearing it.

Like a bunch of stupid knotted yarn. Not a pretty lattice pattern.

Double fail. 

So I bagged up the yarn (who knows, I might have a reason to finish it in the future, but I sure as hell wasn't spending another 15 hours completing it when it wasn't something I was willing to give as a gift), and went back to the drawing board for my mother's Christmas present. This project definitely didn't fit into my "quick, cheap and easy" mantra for holiday crafting!

I ended up getting her a bunch of fun North Carolina foods (like pinot noir jam, honey, etc), since she already has so many "things" and nowhere to really store them. But I felt like she needed one more gift, and so I revisited the DIY idea.

At Thanksgiving I'd noticed my aunt had this photo of our whole family at our wedding framed in her living room.

Shoot Me Now Photography

So I decided to turn it into a photo frame Christmas ornament for my mom. I just cut out a 4.5" x 3.5" piece of card board and some felt with pinking shears, and followed a similar process of layering on the felt with hot glue, like the felt wreath I'd made.

Adding some ric rac ribbon to frame the photo, another mini poinsettia, and some ric rac to hang it on the tree, and I had a DIY picture frame ornament.

Thank goodness this turned out cute enough to gift! Although my sister and I were joking that I could always just glue some macaroni or uncooked beans to it, like the ornaments and DIY things we used to make my mom in elementary school!

Alright. Now I'm finally done sharing my holiday crafts. For this year anyway!

Did you have any crafting failures this holiday season? Has anyone out there tried Martha's no-knit scarf with better results than I had?

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Hope you all have something fun to unwrap under your tree tomorrow morning!

                                                                                                                                              XOXO,

A Crabby DIY Ornament!

You might see this on Weddingbee, but since I know a lot of you don't read the blog over there anymore, I wanted to share this little crafty project here too!

Every year all of the Blog Bees do an ornament exchange, and every year I like to DIY something for my exchange partner. This year I drew Mrs. Hermit Crab, which was quite the challenging moniker to recreate!

Image via Weddingbee

I knew I wanted to do something with a real shell, so I wandered the aisles of Michaels with the little Hermit Crab image pulled up on my cell phone, until I was inspired.

And about 6 hours of work later, I had this little Hermit Crab figurine (I realized after I'd already started making it that HC might not be doing a tree, so I made a figurine instead of an ornament, but it would be easy to just tie a ribbon around the the shell to hang it.)

I highly doubt any of you care how I DIY'd a hermit crab ornament/figurine....but every time I don't think anyone cares about a tutorial, someone always asks. So to cover my bases, and be a good little blogger, I took photos of the steps. Feel free to scroll to the bottom and skip this if you want!

Paint the shell. I used metallic Folk Art paint, and it took 4 coats of the purple for full coverage. I made little blue dots with the blunt end of a wooden shish kabab skewer.

String your beads on 20mm jewelry wire. I just put all of the beads I bought onto the wire to start, so I could cut to the right length easily later (I did this while the shell was drying, so couldn't measure accurately at the time I was doing the stringing).

Hold up the strung beads to the shell once it's dry, and cut one strand of beads to bend in half to use as two of the legs. Twist the ends of the cut wire to secure the beads.

To make the crab claws, I had my husband cut round, flat beads in half using a mosaic tile cutter. Cut along the hole in the beads, so once they are cut in half, you have half of the wire hole exposed on either side, as a half circle, or a trough.

Using a strand of pre-strung beads, attach another piece of wire to the end by twisting it around the strung bead wire, to form a V shape.

Put hot glue in the half circle troughs you created when you cut the flat beads in half, and place the troughs on the wire Vs, as close to the other beads as possible.

Once you have two strung bead sections cut to the correct length and bent in half, and the claw legs completed (so, three strands of beads total, bent in half, to make six legs), glue them into the shell, starting with the back legs.

Finally, make another strand of tiny beads, with black beads at the tips, to create the eyes. In case you didn't know, hermit crabs have some weird looking eyes!

Source

And there you have it. How to DIY a hermit crab out of a shell, beads, and wire, just in case you ever have the need!

And of course, I couldn't send off this little guy without making a cute card, and some custom Hermit Crab wrapping paper! Its just printed on four sheets of printer paper, lined up and taped together.

In return, I got this fabulously DIY'd Cola ornament from Mrs. Ferris Wheel!

Have you ever participated in an ornament exchange before? Or ever tried to recreate a challenging object as an ornament?

Quickie Holiday Cards

Unlike last year, this year I caved and sent out a handful of Christmas cards.

And of course, I just couldn't bring myself to send store bought cards. Not in the midst of my holiday craft-a-palooza. But, like most of my December crafts this year, I wanted something quick and cheap, so I could move on to the next project.

So I grabbed some card stock, snowflake stickers, my x-acto knife and my printer, and whipped up some quickie cards.

After cutting out the card stock, and getting ready to glue everything together, I decided some red ribbon was the perfect extra addition, to tie in the red text. And I already had leftovers from my ribbon tree centerpiece and our spruced up stockings.!

Some glue, ribbon, and stickers, and I was ready to write nice notes to my family members I wasn't going to get to see at Christmas this year.

(You can see my DIY roman shades in action in the background!)

Because I was using leftover ribbon, I ended up with five slightly different card designs.

I think one of my favorite parts is the snowflake watermark on the inside. I think it gives it a little something extra, don'tcha think?* 

And they wouldn't be complete without tying in the snowflake theme on the envelopes. I just ran these through my printer, using the same snowflake clip art from my paper snowflake luminaries, that I found online.

Did you send out Christmas cards this year? Did you go the store bought route, or did you DIY them?

*10 points if you know what movie this is from!

It's Beginning To Look A Little Like Christmas

Not a LOT like Christmas, but at least a little!

Some of the other decorated houses out in blog-land put mine to shame, but I wanted to share anyway. If anything, I can look back on this post next year and be happy about my progress. I've already informed my husband that next year, along with getting our first tree, we will be spending at least $500 on decorations (I would hit up the after Christmas sales this year for like 70% off of that $500, but then we'd have to deal with the pain of moving all the boxes of ornaments and possibly breaking some before they reach our new house, so my hubs said he's OK with paying more next year to avoid all of that).

Our stockings that I made, hung on our downstairs mantle, along with the paper snowflake luminaries.

Under the mantle are the mostly-for-looks "presents." AKA, a couple of gifts, mixed in with empty gift bags, for the illusion of festivity. Am I the only one that does this? It just looked too sad without more gift bags though, since I let my husband open his gifts early, and my gift from him isn't tangible.

And the whole fireplace set up.

Upstairs, on our entertainment center, we have lights on our TV, and garland and more luminary candles in front of the TV.

The front of our house. Since a 2 story ladder isn't something we own (and is on the very long list of things we don't want to buy until we own a home), I just taped lights to the inside of the windows on the second story of our house. It gets the job done, without having to climb up on a ladder, and I've got them all set up on light timers, so I don't have to go from room to room, plugging them in every night.

I really do love our front door (and the felt wreath I made). The detail around it is so pretty, and I hope we can do something similar once we buy a house. Plus, it makes it easy to line the door with lights!

Also, guess what I spotted when I opened the door to go outside and snap these pictures? Two deer on our front lawn! It's not the best picture, since I had to use the flash, and they were moving, but still. Hooray deer! :)

Have you got all of your holiday decorations up already? Is anyone planning on hitting up the after Christmas sales to stock up on decorations for next year?

Winter Song

It's no secret that I have a very deep love for Ingrid Michaelson. She is my favorite singer, I've been to quite a few of her concerts, and I even had my sister's boyfriend learn to play one of her songs on his guitar for our wedding processional. And of course, my husband and I danced to her version of Can't Help Falling in Love for our wedding first dance.

(Gratuitous photo of our first dance, by Shoot Me Now Photography)

I've also written about my almost-as-deep love for Sara Bareilles. I even got to meet her in person once!

(Photo from the radio station's website)

Well, back in December 2008, I got to see Ingrid and Sara in concert together (along with Lenka, Buckcherry, Alanis Morissette, and another one of my favorite bands, O.A.R.). It was the first time I ever heard their duet, Winter Song.

(Crappy cell phone picture I took at the concert of their duet)

I'd forgotten all about this song until I rediscovered it this year. And I found that it has the most adorable animated video to go along with it. This song has been seriously haunting me for the past few weeks. It is actually rather sad, but I love the feeling of hope at the end of the video.

So I thought I'd share, in case you've never heard this beautiful song before. I bet you'll find yourself listening to it over and over too!




Have you come across (or rediscovered) any songs this year that you just can't get out of your head?