Christmas decorations and craftiness

I KNOW! I am awful at blogging lately. FOOEY! I'm seriously considering calling it quits. Here's my thought, though...if I get 8 comments from people saying they want me to keep blogging then I will come up with some sort of strategy to blog at least 4 times a week. But if not then I guess I'll keep doing what I'm doing and blog every 2 weeks or so.
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Moving on...here are some photos from the drama that has been me decorating for this holiday season.

First, I bought that stupid white Christmas tree that I thought was prelit but happened NOT to be prelit. In case you were curious, I did end up putting it together.

I made Kevin take a picture to prove it.



After it was assembled, I was feeling Christmas spirited again. And was looking forward to getting the finished product all assembled and gazing contendly at it's beauty. With that in mind, we spent several hours the next night driving around to store after store trying to find white lights that have white cords. We found PLENTY of white lights with green cords and also colored lights with white cords.

But NO WHITE WITH WHITE.

This lead to some bitter tears being shed in the ornament aisle at Wal-Mart and upon our return home the immediate the dissemblance of that evil Christmas tree.

Now we have our little Charlie Brown Christmas tree up on our coffee table. He has served us well these past several years. I just realized I have no photos of him. Hmmm...maybe I'll snap a photo of him and post it soon.

Or maybe not.

Who knows.

So with no big Christmas tree, I decided I would make up for it with a spectacular mantle. I had such visions of awesome in my head.

But no matter what I did nothing looked good, let alone awesome. It was quite frustrating.

After lots of different arrangements, I ended up with this.



I know.

Way less than spectacular and not even close approaching awesome. (But I did make all of the things in picture frames, so that's gotta count for something, right?!? )

Well, I was prepared to just deal with that mantle and pretend I liked it.

BUT THEN!

I found this beautiful vintage mirror at a local consignment store for $40. So I bought it and put my giraffe reindeer in front of it.



Still not spectacular but definitely more Christmassy than what was going on up there before.

I started to feel more in the Christmas spirit again. Which was good because 3 days later I had a Christmas craft night planned at my house.

We were going to make Martha Stewarts Beaded Letter Ornaments. It looked so easy on the website and my sister in law, Emily, made them several years ago and they were adorable. So I thought it would be a great craft for us to do and practical too!

In preparation, I bought a very unnecessary amount of beads because it would not do to run out midcrafting! (I was so paranoid about it even sent Kevin on a bead run for me. He must love me a lot!)

Here they are waiting for everyone to arrive.





Does anyone else love to run their fingers through beads? It's so soothing for me.

In the end, there were 5 of us making beaded ornaments and talking and eating and drinking sangria.



Some of the girls managed to make wonderful A's and other such tricky letters. Me, well, I ended up making several s' and l's and straight lines.



I'd like to blame the sangria on my crafty ineptitude. Alas, I cannot. I know because I tried to make some prototypes before everyone came over so there would be a finished product for people to look at for inspiration or whatever.

Unfortunately, my letters turned out less Martha and more creative kindergartner. And that was pre-sangria.

So, add in the sangria and well...it's not pretty!

All in all it was a fun night and now I have enough beads to see me through the next decade!