It's a Pinterest Christmas

Every year I change up the theme of our Christmas tree.  This year I wanted to do something a bit rustic and focus on some of our cute bird decorations.  I went to Pinterest for some inspiration and was on a roll.  Please excuse the inconsistency of the following photos.  The charger is broken on my computer that has photoshop, so I am currently unable to edit.  Here's a photo of our tree, it's really grainy due to the low light, but I wanted a photo with the tree lights off and no flash so there would be less weird shadowing and you can see some of the ornaments better.

I made the birdhouse topper with reclaimed wood from when an old family home nearby was torn down.  We've used it for several larger outdoor projects, but I just used a few small scraps for this. The pin that inspired my birdhouse topper.

We made several different types of ornaments.  Babe Jr is responsible for the ones made of book pages.

Bird ornament pin.  Flower ornament pin.  If you are a facebook friend, the flower ornaments were the ones being made that led to the CATastrophe.  Smokey ran under her feet and tripped her when she was cleaning up, causing a whole jar of glitter to be spilled in the kitchen floor.  I have swept and mopped several times since then, and yes, there is still glitter stuck to the floor in places.

I made these flowers from jute twine.

Twine flower tutorial pin.

These stars are hot glued then I tied the twine and hot glued it as well to make them stable.

 

Twig star pin. 

I had to move one of the big frames on the wall when we put the tree up, so I decided to switch the art out for something a little more festive.

The pin is actually for chalk board art.  I sketched it lightly on watercolor paper with a pencil, then outlined in pen and erased all the pencil marks.  I  used a green marker to add a little color to the places that needed to completely be filled it.

I'm working on new stockings this year.  This is the first one I finished.

Ruffle stocking pin.

One of the first things I did this season was gather a ton of pine cones.  I made the garland on the tree just by wrapping beading wire around them to hold them together.  But before we even got the big tree out, I made this little tree for the kitchen.

 

Pine cone tree.   I didn't have a cone form, so I just rolled a file folder into a cone, taped it together, and stuffed it with newspaper.  I put newspaper in the pot, too, then used a wooden skewer to hold them together.  I covered the folder with black construction paper so it wouldn't show between the pine cones.  Then I just used a lot of hot glue and started attaching them in rows.  I went through at least 12 glue sticks.

Also in the kitchen, I switched "EAT" for a more seasonally appropriate "NOEL."

This was inspired by a couple of pins, yarn wrapped letters and Noel with wreath.  I used more folders and tape to make the N and the L, then hot glued and wrapped the yarn in place.   I already had the E, and I recovered an old wreath and stuck on some of my pine cones for the O.

I still have a few works in progress and some of the the gifts I'm giving are pinterest projects, so I can't post them online yet.  We've had a lot of fun crafting so far this year.