There's Nothing Like Handmade...

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, ours was lovely.  I wanted to post about the wonderful gift I hinted at the other day.  I was a lucky girl and received some very lovely and generous gifts, but there's just something special about a handmade gift. This year, as Darryl is back in school, we thought we would do a "no-gift" year for each other. In the end we decided on one-gift each. I got Darryl a new jacket that he needed and he made me something I've been drooling over for years.

His stepmom has a lot of wonderful antique items and one that I've always adored is an old mail sorter that she uses to house all of her mugs and cups. I love how it looks and have mentioned a time or two how I would love to have one for all of my teacups.

What makes it even more meaningful is that Darryl used some 93 year old wood from our garage, which makes this a piece of our first house that we can take with us wherever we may move in the future and I love that.

 

 

He used some super long pieces of wood found in the loft part of our garage...

 

Here's the blank wall before hanging it...

And after it was hung...

I was so excited to fill it with pretty teacups.  I love the contrast of the rustic, old wood and the fancy, china teacups...

 

Some other highlights...we got a new ornament for our first married Christmas together which I love and treasure

 

We also got an address stamp (with our new family name!) which I l.o.v.e.  I can't wait for next Christmas just so I can use it in bulk!  Actually, I still have to find some thank you cards for our wedding so that will be the first order of business.

 

A lovely friend also made us an ornament of our wedding invitations which was super sweet as well... 

 

 

I was also spoiled with some lovely clothes, a book, some speakers, a board game and some gift cards.  But more exciting than opening these lovely gifts is always the anticipation of people opening the gifts I got for them.  Especially when you feel like you got something perfect that they will love.  Of those, I was most excited to see my sister open her ticket to see Lady Gaga in February.  She didn't think she would be able to go, but I just could not imagine going without her so a few of us went in on the gift together to make it happen.  We are super pumped, I think it will be an amazing show.

 

I hope whoever is reading enjoyed their Christmas as well!



Candy Cane Vodka!

Another pinterest inspiration...

(pinterest)

I like vodka, and I like candy canes, so this sounded pretty yummy!  I filled a jam jar with vodka and popped a candy-cane in there for 2 days and it quickly turned a beautiful shade of candy cane red.  I made up a label and tied on a bow and was ready to bring it to a Christmas party we were off to!  (Not before giving it a quick taste test of course and it was yummy!)

After I made it, Darryl asked me how people are supposed to drink it....good question.  I'm guessing shots??  Or a tiny bit in a glass to sip on (because it's pretty sugary!)  But if anyone else has any ideas maybe I'll try it again next year.

I packaged it up in a gift bag and added (yes, another pinspiration!) some "reindeer noses" (8 maltesers and one red gumball)

Can you even remember life before pinterest?!

Tomorrow I'll be back to share the one little thing we got started on over the holidays.

Rein-Beer

Christmas has come and gone, but because I took a break over the last two weeks I never got around to posting a couple of holiday crafts I did.  If you're sick an tired of Christmas stuff, come back in a couple of days, this is more just a way for me to document some things I enjoyed doing!

I thought these guys were so cute on pinterest so I decided to make some for Darryl's sister's boyfriend...

I used different beer to suit his tastes but basically did the rest the same (except I made a "rein-beer" sign to put on either side of the case...which I forgot to take a picture of)

My sister made some too and I love how hers turned out, the scarves are too cute!

This was a fun and easy gift...although it was suprisingly difficult to find brown pipecleaners!


Did you use any pins as inspiration for your gifts this year?

On Comet, On Cupid, On Donner and...

...Chocolate Blitzen!

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend!  We were busy bees with a couple of Christmas gatherings to attend.  For our annual family Christmas Party on Saturday I made these delicious shooters for everyone to enjoy...

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I saw this on pinterest a while ago and saved it in my files.  They were a big hit and they were oh so delicious!

Can you believe I never took a picture of the actual ones I made??  I should have because I made a few changes:  I poured the drinks into shot glasses (it's a pretty rich drink so a full glass might be a bit much) and instead of chocolate sprinkles around the edge, I put a Christmas mix of red, white and green (that was Darryl's suggestion which I like much more than the original)

The above link has the recipe in case you want to try some, but for a quick overview, the ingredients include chocolate ice cream (doesn't that alone have you sold??), vodka, Bailey's and creme do cacao.

Posts this week may be a little sporadic and less house-related.  Things are changing and picking up at work and this week is a bit crazy!

Do you have any favourite holiday drinks?  Have you pinned any that you are just dying to try?  Have your Christmas partiesbegun as well?

Other Christmas Trimmings

I've gone easy this year on the decor, mainly because we have just been so focused on the major final touches for living downstairs again, that I just want to sit and enjoy it all now.  Other than the tree, I've put up just a few things here...

A while back I bought a package of Christmas balls from Value Village for $1.99 and put a bunch of them in glass jars.  They're fairly close to the tree and I love how they catch the light and sparkle just a little brighter...



For next year, I'd like to maybe make a tray to put those glass jars on and add a few other things.  It also needs some major height, you can see how tiny they look haha...

But for this year, that's all.  I'm just wanting to enjoy sitting down here.  Next year, it's on!  Not that I ever really go all out anyways...

I hung our stockings on the hutch this year.  Normally I hang them on the staircase, but the stairs and railings are so nast from all the demo and dust I don't really want them touching.

To an outsider's view the stockings may appear a little creepy haha, but I love them so much.  Every one of my many cousins was each knitted either a Santa stocking or an Elf stocking by one aunt or another.  It's the only stocking I've ever had and I love my Santa.  My sister had the Elf in our family.  Once Darryl and I bought our house and he didn't have a stocking, I asked my aunt to make him one, and I think maybe there had actually been an extra laying around that they gave him.

And on the back door hangs our advent calendar which is also so special to me.  It's an exact replica of the one my sister and I, and several of my cousins grew up with.  Most of our aunts made one for their kiddies and every day we would alternate putting an ornament up on the tree.  And we'd love trying to figure out which ornament was newly added each day. 

A little closer...

A little closer still...

There she is in all her sequenced and felted glory

So the year my sister moved out and was about to have her first Christmas away from home, I wanted her to have a piece of home with her.  My mum, my dad and I all chipped in and made her an exact replica of the one we grew up with.  The next year I moved out and as my Christmas gift, my parents and my sister had all made me my own!  Oh, there were tears!

One thing I'll have to get back into next year is painting our front windows.  Growing up, my mum would paint these amazing Christmas scenes on our front bay window and I would love watching her work (and lay on the floor with my markers and paper and try to copy her) and seeing the painting every time I walked home from school.  And I loved how my dad would put out spotlights so her work could be seen at night too.  It's always been a great Christmas memory for me.

Our first Christmas here I wanted to try my own.  I wasn't sure how it would go or if I'd have the stamina to want to finish it, so I picked some really really simple Christmas cards to work from (I'm not great at free-handing but I can be a pretty good mimic!)...

I couldn't get rid of that glare!  You can kind of see the spots on Santa's shirt and the reindeer's back where condensation started dripping and erasing my paints away!  But now that we've updated our windows and they are no longer single panes nor 91 years old, I think that issue won't be a problem anymore.

Christmas for me is about traditions and memories more than anything else.  I'm a pretty sentimental gal so I couldn't dream about ever replacing my stockings or advent calendar, no matter how outdated they may be! 

What Christmas traditions do you love and remember from your childhood?  Have you carried them on into your own home?  Have you kept any retro Christmas decor?

Thankful Ornament

Back in October we tried writing daily "thankful" notes, an idea we tried from YHL.  I really liked doing this all month, it really made me more aware of things to be grateful for and I think we might try it again next year! I pondered what I'd do with the papers once Thanksgiving was done and then it dawned on me - not long after Thanksgiving is Christmas. I decided to fill an ornament ball with all of our notes!

I didn't want us to have spent a month recording things we were thankful for and then to just throw our hard work and memories away after Thanksgiving passed!  This way I figure if it's something we'd like to do each year, I can label the ornaments with the year and we can have them to look back on. 

So I headed over to Michael's with a 40% off coupon, only to see that the balls were already 50% off - even better!

When I got home I rolled each of the papers up (to fit them better, and for some visual interest) and stuffed them in the ornament. 

Then I wrote "Thanks 2011" on the ball, tied a ribbon to it and hung it on our tree!  I love that it's an ornament that we've both had a hand in, normally all the handmade ornaments are all me, so this is a nice change of pace!





 And here she sits all pretty-like in the tree!



I'm linking up with the holiday craft party at Centsational Girl - there's so many great ideas to check out!

That's a Wrap

Did you all have a nice weekend?  We absolutely adored our first weekend down on our main floor!  We had a few people over for visits, some planned, some pop-ins and we loved them all!  Not having to trek people up to the second floor and squeeze them into a little bedroom felt so great.  Our pride in homeownership has returned!

We took a bit of a break house reno-wise and just enjoyed ourselves.  Yesterday I wanted to wrap the few presents I've bought off my list so far.  Initially I wanted to try out some DIY wrap like newsprint or embellished craft paper. Something like these...

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But then I thought it would be silly of me to go spend more money on new wrapping stuff when I have a container bursting with paper already.  So I decided to use paper I already had, but added my own touch with the name tags...

(I still have a ways to go, I'm hoping to cross a few more gifts off today!)

It took a while to cut everything out, but it's something I enjoy doing!  Maybe next year I'll try some newsprint/craft paper...

What's your wrapping like this year?  Do you add any DIY touches or do you prefer stuff that's pre-made?

Trim the Tree and Wrap The Presents...

...Okay so I'm not on the present wrapping stage yet, but the last thing we got done on Sunday (after the baseboards and the couch) was to put up our Christmas tree!  I have such great memories of decorating our tree as a kid.  My mum, my sister and I would crank the tunes (Mariah, Kenny & Dolly, the Judds, to name a few favs) and set to work.  We always loved reminiscing over each ornament as we unwrapped it.  We also always loved that our parents kept every ornament we ever made them, at school or at home - it makes you feel so proud as a kid!  Then when we were done, we'd call our dad in and he would put up the angel.  Our tree was always a good mix of some of my mum's nice ornaments and our homemade ones (as well as some my mum made!)

Now that I've moved out and have my own house - and that I'm not great with change, especially when it comes to tradition - I've tried to keep a lot of our traditions.  I knew that I didn't want a perfect looking tree for our house.  I wanted a tree filled with memories and stories.  When my sister and I moved out, my mum unloaded a lot of those homemade ornaments on us, and we were grateful as we had none anyways!  So now, on my tree, I have many of the ornaments that I made when I was little.  They always make me giggle when I take them out. 

Here are a few of my favs, most of which I made in elementary school years:

A safety pin beaded angel (one of our uncle's mom was really into crafting and she would have us over to make ornaments, so a few of these were under her guidance)

A sparkly beaded spider

A mod-podge wrapping paper ball from I think Grade 4!

A creepy red-eyed bunny thing

A dough painted snowman

And then a couple of years ago I went through a phase of making ornaments out of burned out light bulbs...

The (unfinished) Grinch, he's supposed to have a Santa hat on

Cindy Lou Who - ghost eyed and mouthless...I forgot about her and never got around to finishing her

I always loved the way the round part of the bulb played up the roundness of her cartoon-baby head

(these lightbulb reindeer guys I had seen someone do on the internet somewhere years ago and wanted to try them out)

And our tree (with the tree skirt!)...

I'm sitting downstairs right now - because last night we officially moved everything back to the main floor!!!  And I can't even describe to you how happy I am about that.  Last Christmas we had a little 1 foot tall tree as decoration in our upstairs bedroom-turned-living-room because our regular tree wouldn't fit.  So this Christmas is extra special.

UPDATE:  I got home from work today to find that our tree had randomly toppled over and the Grinch and Cindy Lou Who didn't survive the fall...I guess I can scratch finishing them off my list!

How is your Christmas decorating going?  Are you into making your own ornaments or do you prefer to buy them?  Do you like to keep all the old ones you made as a kid at school?

It Smells Like Christmas!

I hope you all had a great weekend!  We were busy busy!  On Saturday my sister, my aunt and I headed over to my mum's house for our 3rd Annual Christmas Baking.  Every year we rotate between which house we bake at (next year will be my year again and we'll have a much more spacious and modern kitchen to work with!) 

The first year was at my house, pre-demo:

On Saturday we cranked the carols (after finding out all of our ipods had issues and we couldn't listen to them, we put the radio on a Christmas station), set out our ingredients and got to work!  We had 5 recipes to tackle (and 4 batches of each recipe!):

1.  Sweet Maries
2.  Short Bread

3.  Sugar Cookies

4.  Ginger Sparkles

5.  Coconut Chocolate Squares

Sweet Maries

Short Bread

Sugar Cookies (my fav!)

Ginger Sparkles

Coconut Chocolate Squares



14 hours later I was home and ready for bed!  We started baking at 9:30am and went hard until 9:30pm!  Then we had to wait until 11:30pm for the last batch of squares to cool before we could pack them up.  It was a long, delicious and lovely day!

Although I didn't get around to any decorating (mainly because the living room is bursting with project materials that I'll share later this week), it feels so great to have one very yummy thing checked off my Christmas to-do list, phew!

Did you get any thing checked off your Christmas to-do list this weekend??