What I'm Digging ~~ A Handmade Christmas

I can't believe Christmas is only a few days away! I've found so many amazing D.I.Y. projects that I wanted to try. I made a couple, but I ran out of time for most of them. Oh well, there's always next year! Here's some that were/are on my to-do list:

1. Paper-Mache Letters  2. Hanging Paper Trees  3. Baby's Handprint Ornament  4. Felt Rosette Wreath  5. Tinsel Tree  6. Cookie Cutter Ornament  7. Ornament Wreath  8. Tissue Paper Trees  9. Santa Belt Ornament  10. Ruffled Tree Skirt

Have you come across any cool tutorials or made any of your own?

Fish Scale Christmas Ornament D.I.Y. Tutorial

I was looking at Christmas ornaments at a store a couple of weeks ago and came across a really cool one that was covered in little discs making it look like fish scales. I loved it, but they only had it in silver and I wanted it in a few different colors so I decided to try making it. It ended being really easy!

What I used:
- foam ball
- glue that works on foam - I found this one on clearance at Michael's
- 12 x 12 scrapbook paper
- circle punch (5/8")
- small piece of wire (ornament hanger might work even better)
- paintbrush (optional)

1. I started by cutting out lots and lots of circles, around 100.

2. I used the paintbrush to put the glue on the discs to try to keep it a little cleaner. I started by gluing one circle down, and then glued six circles around it, each one overlapping the previous one as well as the first circle.

3. Each row will end with the last circle being completely uncovered by any other circles, that's where I started each new row.

4. Once I got closed to being finished I put my wire in the top. An ornament hanger would work perfectly for this, I had some extra wire close by so I just twisted that into a loop and used it instead. Before pushing the wire into the ball I fully covered it with glue to help ensure it stays in place.

5. Then I continued with the rows until all of the white was covered.

And there you have it; a little time-consuming, but super easy and so pretty! Let me know if you give it a try!

We have these weird cutouts in our living room wall, I hung the ornaments and used the leftover paper to cut out bigger circles; it filled the space nicely!

Getting Our Christmas On

Wow, it's been a really, really long time since I've posted anything. It's been pretty crazy around here; we're still trying to get everything unpacked and get the house all pretty-looking, and then Thanksgiving came and snuck up on us, and now all of a sudden it's Christmas!

Actually, I've put a lot of the unpacking/prettifying things on hold to at least get the living room looking like Christmas around here. And we've spent a good amount of time doing Christmas-y stuff like driving around looking at lights, going to see Santa, and watching far too many Christmas movies. We still need to make cookies, but we can't do that too far in advance or they'll all be gone before we can leave any out for Santa.

A couple of things we attempted to do but failed were going to the Holidazzle parade and to Macy's Santaland. I've lived in Minnesota my entire life and I've never done either. The Holidazzle  parade is well, a parade - outside, in Minnesota, in the middle of December. Yes, that is as crazy as it sounds. Regardless, we still (halfheartedly) tried to go this year, but we didn't factor in just how many people would be there, or how hard it would be to find a parking spot. We took this as a sign (maybe just a sign of poor planning, but still a sign that we were not meant to stand outside freezing, watching a parade in the middle of winter!).

Well, since we were already in Minneapolis, and we had eventually found a parking spot somewhat near Macy's, we decided to check out Santaland. I'd love to tell  you more about it, but I can't because I've never seen it.

When we first walked into the store we found a little station where you could write a letter to Santa and put it into the postal box. Super cute and Riley loved it, he wrote a letter for himself and one for Ava. Then we began walking around the store, and walking and walking. Seriously, this store was huge! And all we wanted to do was find Santa! Finally, we figured out that he was on the eight floor.

So, then we had to find the elevators, shouldn't be that hard, right? Apparently Macy's likes to hide their elevators (and bathrooms). Eventually we found the line for the elevators and waited. And waited some more. Then we got on, and then about thirty more people did too. Then we started going up until we got to the fifth floor, then the doors opened and an employee yelled into the elevator that whoever wanted to see Santa had to get off here. We stepped out and saw the longest line I have ever seen in my life. And we were still three floors away from Santaland!

That's when we turned around and left. We were all a little disappointed, but nobody wanted to spend the rest of the night standing in that line.

We have, however visited Santa at other places, three times in fact. The first two times were practice runs to let Ava get used to him, so we could avoid a similar picture to last year's:

This year she did awesome! This is what she does when we ask her to smile, we call it her "Popeye face":

I'm pretty happy with the picture we ended up with. I think we'll do some practice runs next year too.

I'm not sure why this scan looks so weird.

If you have kids, do you do practice runs with them meeting Santa? Have you been to Santaland, is it worth the line?