christmas part 3 - the little trees!

i actually intended on 3 extra trees, two in the living room/studio, and one in the kitchen. i ran out of time for the kitchen one, but i loved the two i did manage to put up!

the first one is actually a vintage tinsel tree, the came in the coolest box, and the base almost looks handmade.



this tree sits above my sewing machine table, right on top of the drawers that hold all of my embroidery threads.


it had all my favourite smaller ornaments on it, including a set of 12, and several acorn shaped ones.


the ornament at the very top is one of my favourites - it has a stylized poppy painted on it.


so pretty!


the second little tree that i put up was a white tree, again from daiso, though it was $8 because it's bigger than the pink tree in the bathroom.


i used all of my bright pink vintage ornaments on it, and they looked fabulous. i hung crocheted pink snowflakes on the lamp shade,


and strung beaded garland around my pictures.

i also dyed some bottle brush trees with dylon hot pink, and they turned out FABULOUS! the colour is super rich and vibrant.


i was really tempted to leave the pink display up for longer, but decided that they should all come down at the same time so that everything could be stored together. i'm at least 2/3s of the way done undoing everything. i know it's the 22nd of january! i'm trying to organize it all, okay?!

anyway, that's the last of the christmas decorating. i didn't do handmade cards this year, which was so sad, but i did do some handmade gifts, so i'll be posting those soon.

and then we can move onto another holiday that i love - valentine's day!

christmas part 2 - the big tree!

i've been collecting vintage glass ornaments for years and years now. even the years that i didn't put my tree up, i still collected the ornaments. i went through them about 5 years ago, weeding out the generic plain ones, because i was approaching multiple rubbermaid bins full of them!

this year was the first year that i've been able to do a tree with JUST the vintage ornaments, and i love how it worked out! (the garland wasn't vintage, but it WAS thrifted - the boxes it came in shows that it was from costco. i paid $1.50 each for two boxes)



this is actually a new tree, because mine was somehow lost after i moved back in with my parents. dad borrowed it for work, and nobody knows where it went after that!

i decided to get one with the lights on it, just cause it would be less work, but i didn't realize that they weren't LED until later. i should've known, it was too cheap for LED, but it was still very pretty all lit up.






i have that tree one in multiple colours. they must have been really common, because i didn't buy them all together.


i love the blue star one, i have 4 of those.


the one on the bottom left is definitely the biggest on the tree!


i love the pear shaped one on the top left.




this tree topper is actually plastic. i was so sure that i used to have several glass toppers, but maybe i gave them away when i pared down the collection.


the long blue one was a splurge at a vintage store in november. i had a crappy day, and saw it in the window. i have plenty of long ones, but this is the first i've seen shaped like this, with ridges.


the pear shaped one again, though slightly washed out.

i managed to score a white tree on boxing day this year, so i'm thinking that next year the vintage ornaments will all go on a white tree with white led lights. won't they pop wonderfully?

christmas, part 1 - the bathroom!

i loooove christmas. i hate the crowds, the shopping malls, the stress, the rampant christianity, etc, but i love the glitter and glam, the memories and traditions, and spending time with loved ones. and turkey and stuffing, of course!

i haven't been able to decorate much the last few years because i didn't have the space, so i decorated A LOT this year.

since i went just a teensy bit overboard with xmas decorating, i'm going to split the pics up into a few posts.

the first place i decorated was my bedroom, and i posted pics of that tree back in december.

next up was my bathroom, all in shades of purple

i found some ribbon at the $ store and used it as garlands over my jewelery storage.


i used tinsel garland on the mirror, the only place where it wouldn't touch the painted walls - i learned the hard way years ago that garlands sometimes bleed when exposed to the steamy heat of a bathroom!


i used the same ribbon again over the toilet, with a glittery lavender bow in the centre.


the frame is a vintage one that i painted with krylon (the purple frames were what inspired the bathroom colour scheme in the first place), and the mirrored purple candleholders are from the $store.


across from the toilet wall, i hung a lavender glittered snowflake, and a small lavender crocheted snowflake, on the medicine cabinet. i dyed bottlebrush trees to sit beside a small purple chest that holds q-tips.


close up of the trees


and below the medicine cabinet, there was the tree


the pink tree came from daiso, it was $5.50 (i <3 daiso!) i searched for a purple tree for a while before finding this pink one. i did find a purple tinsel tree later for $15.00, but it was too bright anyway....



i used some of the same ribbon as garland again, and added a few glittery purple balls that my ex left behind, a few regular sized purple glass balls, and then a package of matte and shiny little lavender balls that i bought at zellers (kinda like a cross between target and kmart). they're "alfred sung", ohh la la!


and of course, a tree topper. a fabulous glittery be-feathered bird clip.


i added a bit of glittery goodness to the closet as well -


the glittery picks came from micheals, and matched perfectly!

and the finishing touch was the doily wreath i made. i dyed the doilies using the same dye as the bottle brush trees, and then molded them into a wreath shape.


i took pictures as i went along, so i'll post them soon!


and that was the bathroom!

update!

i can't believe we're less than two weeks away from christmas!

i'm so excited, i love christmas. it's the most drag queeny holiday of the year, the perfect excuse for glitter and glam, which is totally up my alley.

and it's also an awesome excuse for crafting, and as usual, i've planned more crafting than i have the energy for (you'd think i'd get used to this by now, but i still expect myself to do the same amount as i could 5 years ago!).

since i've been working, it's taken me so much longer than i had hoped to finish putting the apartment together - the kitchen's barely been touched at all, and i'm still missing curtains in the bedroom, i still need to paint shelves, etc, etc!

i had decided that i'd have the house done by december 1st, and i'd start xmas decorating then, but of course, that didn't happen. the house wasn't done, i didn't have the energy, my back hurt to much to get the decorations out of storage....

so yesterday i finally hauled the rubbermaids out and packed them into my car. they were incredibly light, since they're mostly just glass ornaments, but all the bending and such pretty much wore me out. i was so impatient to start putting things up as soon as i got home!

so far i've sorted all the ornaments into piles for each tree, and i've assembled one and a half trees. i put up the tree in my bathroom, but it needs a few more ornaments, so tomorrow i'm going to the mall across the street to pick up a set i saw the other day, and then it'll be done.

i got the tree in my bedroom up, which is really the easiest one, since i use the same ornaments on it every year! i did use a different topper this year, and i love it - i don't know why it never occurred to me before! that tiara's been sitting on my shelf for years.





the tree itself is one i spraypainted years ago, looking at it today, it could use some touch ups! the garlands are black and silver scarves that i found at a dollar store, and the ornaments are mostly all from micheals, oddly enough. the purple and red balls are from micheals, and so are the glittery purple sprays of fake foliage or whatever they're called (is there a word for them?). the lights are purple, though they look sort of blue in the picture. i picked them up at halloween one year, so they have a black cord, not the usual green one available at christmas.

i'm super excited to put up my big tree this year, because i haven't had space for 4 years now. i have a large collection of vintage ornaments (and i've pared it down considerably too!), and they'll all go on it. there's a bit of a problem because no one can FIND my big tree though! my dad borrowed it to decorate at work one year, and since i haven't needed it, we're not sure where it went after that. i went out and bought a pre-lit tree that goes together in just 3 pieces, and now i'm not so sure i even WANT him to find my old tree, with it's millions of branches to assemble!

i have so many crafty things i want to do right now, i've obsessed with wreaths, and have so many ideas - more ideas than i have doors to hang wreaths on! i bleached a bunch of bottle brush trees and wreaths the other day, and now i'm dying them. one colour in particular is coming out SO vibrant, i just love it.

i bought my trees at dollar stores this year. it was marginally cheaper to buy them at micheals using a 40% off coupon for the big bag (and frankly, JUST marginally. micheals is so expensive), but the ones from micheals rusted much easier, and have plastic bases, which don't paint as well.


i'm trying to do some machine embroidery, though it's slow going - for some reason my machine is only stitching at half the speed it used to stitch at. weird, i know! no one can figure out why - the dealer that serviced it, or the brother technical support. and even though i'm using the same designs i used last year, i'm having difficulty with some of the stitching. words look wonky.

i don't know. i might just be imagining the wonky thing. maybe they were wonky last year, and i just didn't notice!

i did stitch up a shirt for my dad the other day - he called me up out of the blue and needed me to do it super quick for him. they'd had a co op student working with them for the last few months, and yesterday was his last day, so they wanted a t-shirt for him. it was originally going to say "#1 examiner" or something, until he got the idea to write "cougar bait" on it, at which point he phoned me again, all excited! apparently all the middle aged women that he works with just loved the co op student, and they teased him about older women all the time. dad found this image online, i have no idea where, and sent it to me. i digitized it with PE Design Lite, and stitched it on the upper left side, and then stitched the workplace and the year on the sleeve. for such a rush job, it turned out pretty well!


this is a screen print from the digitization, i didn't have time to take a picture of the actual shirt.

and that's about all i've been up to. a few little xmas presents that i'm trying to get done in time to send out, and i need to get my cards out soon too! i'm super duper close to being finished an embroidery project, but i set it down for a bit while i worked on a project that turned out awful - it's so frustrating! i haven't done much cross stitch, but that's okay, because i still haven't posted the last pieces i did!

may/07 - cleanliness is next to godliness bathroom

i decorated my bathroom, but i'm much too lazy to upload the pics to photobucket and post them here, so instead i'll post the craftster link.

http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=171758.0

i love my bathroom!