Burt Bids Farewell!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas celebration!  As requested, here are a few more photos of Burt in hiding this year.  (See this post for more Burt pictures from earlier this month.)

Just Chilling:)!

Yes, we like ice cream.  A whole bunch.  And yes, our freezer needs a good clean out and some reorganization.  That's what January is for!

When there is a birthday, we often spell out the birthday person's name with our letter mugs.  When Lucky saw Burt in the U mug for 'JESUS', the words that immediately came out of her mouth were: "What the U?!"

Hanging like a tree bat

Flower Power!

Sneaking a Sugar Cookie!

Right now, Burt is living full time at the North Pole.  We can't wait for his return next year!!

New Stockings!

In keeping with the red, white and modern theme that some how evolved with our Christmas decor this year, I decided to make some new stockings for our mantle.  Here are the stockings we had before:

And here are the new ones I made:

I had originally planned to make 4 black and white striped stockings with felt tops, but I didn't have enough black and white striped fabric on hand.  Instead, I went and pulled out a bunch of  black and white fabrics from my fabric stash and let each family member choose one for their stocking.  Charm chose the dog fabric, Lucky liked the polka dots, Bill chose the striped fabric, and I picked out a floral fabric.  I picked up four packs of red piping and used close to 1 pack per stocking so the project cost about $8 total.  I should note that it is pretty easy to pick up stockings for $3 or so right now at stores like Menards...so this wasn't really a big cost saver:).  It was just one of those projects that I wanted to try.  Piping the felt 'fold down' part of Charm and Bill's stockings was a bit tricky to figure out, but I eventually got it after using our original green stockings as a guide.  Our new stockings are not perfect by any means, but they are homemade, and that's always nice:).

Here is a quick picture of Charm's pinned stocking, which was the first one I made:

I should also note, that my floral stocking was quickly replaced when I unwrapped this huge-normous red dollar store stocking from Lucky.  Apparently, she doesn't want Santa to skip me:).  I completely love it!

 How funny is this?:

Merry Christmas!!

Deer Christmas Tablescape!

I took a few moments last Sunday to put together a simple 'table scape' for a little Christmas brunch/lunch/gathering.  We ended up not even using the table to eat because the Vikings were on television, but we did enjoy the festive setting that night for dinner. 

Here were my supplies:

There was a little glare with this picture.  Whoops.  I used white antler picks from Mara Mi and 3 cardboard tree cutouts from Mara Mi as well.  (Both the trees and antler picks were gifts from the lovely Oma (and Opa, I guess too:).)  Thank you!)  The trees were about $6 and were available at Target this year too.  I also used a roll of brown wrapping paper from the dollar store and some of the leftover faux snow from our photo shoot.  I didn't end up using the red napkins.  I opted to stick with the blue, green, brown and white color scheme that the room has going on already.  I did add in some round slate coasters for drinks/name markers that I had picked up from Michael's on the cheap this summer.  I believe it was a couple dollars for 4 of them.  I had Bill drill holes in most of them for beverage dispenser markers at Charm's Party. 

 

Here's how it looked:

 



I just rolled out the paper, centered it in the middle of the table and taped it underneath the table on the ends.  It stayed really well.  It would have been fun to have the kids draw on it when we were done too...we could have used it as wrapping paper!:)

 



See how the slate coasters worked well as place markers too?

 

I just love this deer!  I saw him on clearance yesterday at Target for 50% off: $15!  I almost got a spare:)!  As an aside, tons of Christmas decor is already marked down to 50% off at Target and the Neiman Marcus line is 50% off as well.  (Clearance markdowns vary regionally, so you might want to call ahead first!)

 

 

Another festive and simple holiday project!

Festive Red Pom Pom Curtains

I wasn't loving how our blue ikat curtains were looking with all the Christmas decorations in our great room.  See what I mean:

So I decided to make a curtain change.  I gathered my materials...a pair of Ritva curtain panels from IKEA, some red sewing thread and several yards of red pom pom trim.

I pinned the trim to the edge of the curtain, and then sewed a straight line.  It was in the words of Lucky, 'easy peasy pumpkin easy'.  I also took the extra 10 minutes to hem the curtains to the appropriate length.  There are many curtain panels in our house and the only ones that are actually hemmed and not just safety pinned to the appropriate length are the curtains in the kids rooms, and this pair of panels.  Some day I'll get to the rest of our panels:).

And now for the after:

So much better...and we'll be able to use them for Valentine's Day too!!

Christmas Deer Pillows

I somehow got it in my head that I wanted to make Christmas deer pillows to add some red to our great room and to go along with our more modern joy sign that I made last year.  Also, my super sweet husband gifted me with one of these guys from Target in November as a little surprise treat, and it was inspiration for my pillow project as well:

So with inspiration and materials in hand, I went to work creating some deer pillows.  The first step was finding a deer image online that I could reproduce by hand.  I measured my pillows and determined how big I wanted my deer head to be on the pillow, and I used that size as a guide to create a deer template out of poster board.  I only drew half of the deer head, and then I folded the poster board in half and cut out my drawing to get a completely symmetric deer head.  

Here is my deer template:

 The rest was easy and involved pinning the template onto white fleece fabric.  I cut around the template again to create a white fleece deer head that I then ironed on (using the same process as Charm's Anchor Pillow) to a red pillow cover that I sewed using material left over from Charm's birthday party and some white piping.  I used leftover Steam A Seam fusible web to adhere the deer heads to the pillows.

Here are the two pillow covers before the inserts were placed inside and the bottom side was hand sewn shut:

 And here is the after:

Simple and festive!!

Burt the Elf Announces YHL Book Giveaway Winner!

I'm going to let Burt, our elf, announce the winner of the YHL Book Giveaway.  Here are a few of the places he's been hiding lately:

Dinosaur Parading in the Basement!

Sucker Jar Sweet Tooth Time

Riding a zip line in our kitchen.

Bill finally understands why I included a chair in our stairwell gallery wall:).

Curtain Peeking

Sugar Diving

More toy fun.

The fourth wise man.

And now for the drawing..

 The suspense is building!

Lucky pulled a name out of a hat!

And here's Burt....

 And Lucky:

Congrats Murphyboysmom5!  If you could email your mailing address to sunshineontheinside@yahoo.com by the morning of Friday, December 21st, I'll get your book right out to you!  Thank you to everyone for entering...I see I need to come up with a few posts on toy storage solutions:)!

I plan to have a few more Christmas projects posted before Christmas, so stay tuned!