Less than a month until Christmas! I don't know about you, but I love the holidays. The lights, cinnamon smells, hot chocolate, Christmas movies, shopping for presents, church gatherings with a little extra in their messages and seeing other people get into the spirit of giving. In the Waltz household we waste zero time getting ready for the holidays. For anyone who has tried to celebrate the holidays while living in an apartment - you know that it can be a pain lugging a tree up the steps and trying to be cautious with the hole drilling and such. So without further ado - we have a few DIY Christmas ideas to share this week and maybe you can tackle one of them yourself! Here's the nitty gritty of how it's all going down over here in the rainy northwest. Our black Friday consisted of going to Goodwill and Michael's for a fun tree display a la Pinterest.
In a past post,
I made some candle holders with branches. Well, we kept the extra
branches so that I could either make more of those or find another
creative outlet for the branches. I saw some creative ideas online and decided to do a twist on the traditional tree. We went to Goodwill to search out a big oval style hurricane vase/bowl. As an employee was putting items away I spied this beauty on his cart and made it ours for $2.99. Of course this is after we gave it a bath..
I had 2 bags of cinnamon smelling pine cones from last years decorating and decided to see what I wanted the set up to look like. We trimmed down the branches a bit so that they were about double and a half the length of the vase. As you can see Weger kept a close eye to make sure we did a good job..
After shopping at Goodwill I wanted to make the branches sparkle and our theme this year is a gold Christmas. We picked up some gold and silver (for a little extra sparkle) spray glitter for $5.99 each. When we got home we cut open a garbage bag - laid it out on our little deck and sprayed a few branches at a time with the gold first, then the silver.
After a few hours of drying time, the branches were brought back in and we reset them in the vase with the pinecones.. it looked okay at this point but I still thought something was missing.
A little more sparkle! I raided our ornament box full of different colored ornaments and specifically pulled out just the gold ornaments and we took everything out of the vase to start over. Filling in a few pine cones and then some gold ornaments in the dead space leaving room in the center for the branches to stand. After fussing with it for a little bit and trying to find the best angle - here is our finished product.
I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out - I don't really think the photo does it justice.. but you get the idea. : ) Voila!
Here is a better shot of how pretty the gold ornaments shine next to the warm brown in the pine cones.
Going with our Oregon look of a Christmas in our lovely apartment abode - we did up the mantle a bit but I won't make this longer with the details of that.. but take a look at how Travis added the gold touches to the garland (also found at Michael's).
So that's the start of our holiday decorating.. have
you ever done something "different" tthan the traditional ideas for
decorating?? Tell me you're crazy like us and also pick a little bit
here and there from nature to make your home pretty.. :)
Here's a sneak peek at our next activity -
