All that Glitters

In the early fall, we began a renovation of our living room in hopes that the revitalized room would be ready in time for Christmas. From the optimistic vantage point of early September, the project seemed basic enough: install a fireplace flanked by built-in bookshelves, cover up exposed heating pipes with a drywall box, add crown molding and paint the room. 

As there is no money in our bank account for a suitable team of professionals, this like all our projects, squeezes snugly into the category of do-it-yourself weekend endeavors. Busy schedules and the inevitable delays caused by unforeseen problems however, find us now in mid-December with a house all topsy-turvy and a living room filled with tools, loose baseboards and drywall rubble. 

Our living room furniture is currently keeping the dining room furniture company in the dining room. 

In summary, the house is a mess. 

Given the state of things, I can't bring myself to decorate for Christmas, except in the most basic of ways. 

I am doing a few simple displays to keep things festive. For our third floor loft, I have done an arrangement of white branches in a silver urn. 

Every year we add a few paper decorations to our collection of home-made ornaments; an assortment of items that stretches back to include the paper chains we made out of construction paper the first year we were married and marches forward in time to encompass the paper birds, angels and Santas our son Daniel made every year he was in elementary school. Always a sentimental about handmade things, I have kept almost all of these treasures. 

The balls above are made from circles of two-sided card stock (scrapbook paper). Both were made using a single circle paper punch. 

On the right, four circles of card stock were stitched together using a needle and thread (the stitching results in a central vertical seam). Then the sides of the circle are folded out from the center seam to make a ball. Easy!

The ball on the left is also easy to make, but a bit more complex to explain in a short blog post. If you want, I can email you instructions.

The golden snow flakes are from Lowlaw's Superstore, the icicles and white Santa are part of the Debbie Travis ornament collection for Canadian Tire stores. The silver pine cones and white bear I had already.

In the front hall, I have covered one of my small silver feather trees with birds and a set of long brownish-burgundy glass ornaments.  The small silver trees in the background are simple decorations from the dollar store.

Above the hall table, I hung a wreath I made a few years ago. It is a simple project, easily replicated by using a twig wreath as a base and adding glitter covered fruit with a hot glue gun.

This is one of my oldest birds, which I found at a flea market. Originally, it looked a bit forlorn having lost its tail feather. With the addition of a new white gull feather, it is as good as new!

Among the most exotic of my bird ornaments is a pink flamingo, an owl and the swan seen above, with its tiny gold crown.

All I need now is to add a few decorative touches outside of the house and we are ready for the holidays.