Merry Merry Merry!

While enjoying a wonderful day with my family I wanted to take a moment to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and remind us all of the promise that is fulfilled through the most wonderful gift of ever given. I can think of no better expression than these words from my favorite Christmas Hymn: O Come O Come Emmanule.

O come, Desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
And be Thyself our King of Peace.

Fashion Show, Fashion Show, Fashion Show at Lunch - Christmas Party

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Every once in a while I like to pull together outfit posts where I do things like imagine things like what I would wear if I was redoing my first day of college. When I saw this sweet vintage Christmas card pop up over on Pinterest I knew it was just the thing for an outfit up dating.

Happy Holidays! by elizabethfink featuring gold plated earrings

I'm certainly thinking I'll make my Christmas party get up red, white and polka dotted!

A very pinterest Christmas

I have been pinning Christmas-y things over on Pinterest for, well, ever, I think a Christmas idea might have been my very first pin. For almost as long I've had this Pinterest Christmas idea rolling around in my head. So friends today I share with you three Pinterest inspired Christmas projects I've been working on over the last month. To get things started I found this picture of a glittered village with custom dyed bottle brush trees (originally from here).
Then I added some "pinspiration" from this image (found here). I loved the jars so much that a complete idea was formed.

I started by bleaching, dying and spray painting some craft store bottle brush trees. I used this post as my guide to tree dying.

For my little houses I used the great template from Little Glitter Houses four via this post from A Field Journal.
And here they are all mixed together with jars, that I had around the house and my large collection of vintage Readers Digest books (I have never read a single story from one of these books, but they have such great colors and patterns on their covers that I find myself pulling them out over and over again).
For my last project I used this picture of Anthro bobbles as my jumping off point. I'm going to go ahead right now and let you know I'm not all together happy with how they turned out.
I picked up a six pack of clear glass bulbs at the craft store (I broke one so I ended up with five), for one, I just emptied a two packages of sequins and for another I stuffed it full of the Highligh fake snow stuff (it is really more like Easter grass). For the other three I coated the inside with paint and here is my problem; I used glitter paint and it did not coat very nicely, but I'm sure they will be fine hung on a tree.
Finally if you just can't get enough, you can check out my Holiday Ideas board.

Have you been working on any Christmas projects? Inspired by Pinterest or not I'd love to take a look so leave me a link and I'll check 'em out.

P.S. sorry my pictures are so crummy, it is just so dark in my house these days. I can't wait until we are on the other side of the Winter equinox and coming into the light.

It's beginning to look a lot like . . .

We have had our first real snow of the season, it was the perfect kind of snow, you know those big beautiful flakes that stick to tree branches and make the whole world look a little more magical. Love that, just love it. Meanwhile things are starting to look fairly Christmas-y around my little house I've put up my new white tree (squeal! so cute!) I'm going to share a few other Christmas project this week - for real I finally feel like I'm coming out the other side of this cold from hell two and a half weeks later so I think I can finally get my act together to take photos when the light is still good (so hard when it gets dark at about 5 o'clock). But to hold you over I thought today I'd pull together a little list of fun Christmas things.

1. Remember when I was all: "I'm putting together gift guides for guys" and then did nothing? You don't oh good, but incase you do remember and are still hoping for a little shopping insterpation, I'm hoping to meet you halfway. I'm not going to pull together the gift guides, but I will share the Pinterest boards I was using to organize things. So here, here, here and here you go.

2. While we are on the topics of gifts I wanted to point you to a wonderful gift idea, one that is so great I only wish I had someone on my list that I could buy one for. Not only are these Hearts4Hearts girls dolls very cute a portion of the sale of each doll goes to work that World Vision is doing the country that the doll's character is from.

3. And you know while we are on the topic of World Vision, if you are stumped on what to get that person who has everything maybe the gift of an animal, an education or clean water to a child in need. I receive the World Vision catalog every year, but this is the first year I have gifted anything. (And for a gift that would be good anytime of year, my cousin Lydia and I were just talking about how this little goat stuffed animal and the gift of a goat to a child in the babies name would be a great baby shower gift.)

4. The Girls with Glasses Show has put out another Chirstmas song/video this year, it is cute, but I still really love this one from last year:

5. Later this week I'm going to post my 12 favorite Christmas movies. The Flight Before Christmas will not be on the list, after helping my mom decorate and clean on Saturday my sister and I watched this movie, because we were just to tired to find something else. It is the worst ever!

Read Something Good: The Hunger Games

Well I have been hit with one killer cold, you know the kind that makes breathing a chore and makes you start inventing a throat scraping device. Yeah that kind. So my brother gift guides will be up over the weekend, but for today a Read Something Good post will have to do. I know I am so far behind on the whole Hunger Games thing, so very far, but now I'm on board and unlike all you early adopters I get to read all three books in one big binge. And that is just what I intend to do for this months reading pick. So there you have it the last month of Read Something Good and I'm going out with a bang!

P.S. All my other read something good posts can be found right here! And I'm working on a little round up/review sorta thing for the end of this month as well, so keep on the look out for that!