Getting into the spirit of Christmas, the second step!

In reality I have skipped my first step (making our Christmas cards). But I'm not going to let that stop me from going forward. This weekend I promise will make an attempt at that project. I am going to continue our trend of using our children's artwork in combination with a few of their photos.

In the meantime I am continuing my small steps to the holidays. Every year I try a few new handmade decorations to get me in the spirit. I wanted to share one cute idea I had. Being a big collector of driftwood I thought this little card/note holder was a great idea. I had seen many wire holders but none using driftwood. If I had had more time I would have tried making some for my shop but that will have to wait until next year I suppose.



I also made a few more wire "curls" to place in my blue bottle collection in my kitchen "niches". Putting a used wine cork on the end and into the bottle helps them sit up better.





My daughter has a friend named "Annie Ootie". She is an adorable cloth doll in the Waldorf style. This Christmas my daughter wants a friend for her. So next week my plan is to start work on this friend. I think that Annie wants a little boy to be her friend. This time I promised to let my daughter see the process and have some say in the hair and eye color. I have a kit I purchased from Magic Cabin last year and some yarn for hair.

Bird's nests

I have never been interested in planning for Christmas until after Thanksgiving. My only exception to that rule is that we start working out the details on our own homemade holiday cards towards the middle of November. I have always hated seeing Christmas stuff even before Halloween is over.

This year though I realized that if I want to sell any Christmas things in my shop I am going to have to get an earlier start. And so I have been thinking on this a little and came up with these little bird's nests on tiny clothespin clips for the tree. The majority of our own tree decorations are birds though we include all the special vintage ornaments that we have treasured over the years. Last year's tree falling disaster really destroyed quite a few of our ornaments so I am determined to make a few more this year.

So here is my first set of ornaments for the holidays which I am selling in my shop...



Our school canoe trip which I chaperoned was a lot of fun. The wind was crazy though and made the canoing a little difficult. I can't include the pictures though because there were so many school children in them. But I think the kids learned a lot and had fun too.