Christmas 2012 Awesome Stuff I Made!

 One of my most favorite parts of the holiday season is the opportunities of creating stuff...baking, gifts, ornaments, decor...all sort of fun stuff!

First up...my tree.  Because I have kids and kids come with stuff...I had to trade in my big fat tree for one o those tall skinny ones.  I wasn't sure how I was going to decorate it without it looking VERY clustered.  I have waaay too many ornaments.  Well I finally decided to take inspiration from my woodsy looking star tree topper.  That next week my family and I travel to eastern Iowa for Thanksgiving.  The best thing about travel to the tiny town of Tipton, IA is the AWESOME cute little shops they have lining their main street.  So the day after Thanksgiving...when everyone was watching the big game...I sneaked away to go to the "grocery store".  I am pretty sure my husband knew better.  I hit up Daisy's On The Square.  It was an amazing 30 minutes just wondering around and taking it all in.  I ended up leaving with this really petite grapevine garland....I was REALLY hoping I could make it work on my tree back at home.  I also picked up the adorable grapevine cone tree you can see on the table in one of the pictures below.

 

The grapevine worked great!  I was so pleased with how it looked on the tree once I got it home!  I continued the woodsy look by tucking in some long pine cones that I had collected in winters past. I also found some cute red berry floral picks and stuck those in all over.

I also took inspiration from this burlap tree skirt tutorial over at Done Over Decor.  It came it out really cute and was pretty easy.

 

My next holiday craft was an advent calendar.  There are so so so many options of DIY advent calendars it was hard choosing what I wanted.  I pursued one of the local craft stores here in town for further inspiration.

I found these tiny vinyl numbers from 1 to 30 and my mind just took it from there....I knew I wanted those little favor tins you see with the wedding supplies, but I couldn't find those until I stopped at Hobby Lobby later.  I grabbed a piece of fiber board, a small stack of Christmas paper, and those vinyl numbers and headed out of the store.

I got the tins, spray painted the board, and used my Fiskars scalloped circle punch and cut out all different circles from the Christmas paper stack.  I put the number on the lids of the tins.  Once the board was dry I used epoxy to glue the bottoms of the tins to the board.  and then used simple craft glue to glue the paper inside each tin.  I drilled two holes at the top of the board and strung some ribbon through it.

This year I had Rolos and pretzels in the tins so that my 3 year old had something to each day she checked.  In later years I may get adventurous and make out those cute little activities slips for each day.  There are so many neat possibilities for this!

Baking, Baking, and MORE BAKING!!!!  I loved these cute little ginger bread trees decorated in white royal icing...they were AMAZING with my morning coffee!

 And because my three year old Hayden has been very obsessed with gingerbread men this year...we made several of them too!

 My three year old and I made these Christmas Cheer shakers for all her aunts and grandmas.  I picked up salt & pepper shakers at the Dollar tree (2/$1).  And all sorts of random little Christmas tid-bits at Hobby Lobby and she had a blast filling them!  Again I am not sure where the credit goes for these, my husband's grandmother had recieved one as a gift several years ago and I stole the idea!

 

Here are the finished shakers...I printed the tags and spiced them up with a piece of burlap and a jingle bell...and attached wire for hanging.  The tag reads:  

"At this time when we
feel most blessed,
Holidays can make us
feel real stressed.
When the "bah humbugs"
start coming near,
Just shake yourself up
some Christmas cheer!! "

(Sprinkle on others as needed)

 And as gifts for all my Wino friends I made these adorable Cork Reindeer....There are so many versions of these online I am not sure exactly where I saw it first.  They came out super cute!