Old Window, New Life!

At work, we have Christmas music on all day long in our arts room and I am loving it! Today some of the windows got decorated and more decor to come. I love that I get to celebrate the holidays with family, friends and in my work life too.

Back at home Trav and I have finished up some of our garlands, glass hurricane bowls with ornaments and reindeer setting. (I love decorating with reindeer adornments at Christmas time.) Remember how we decided to forgo the traditional Christmas tree and decorate with our natural branches and ornament/pine cone arrangement ?? Well we still wanted to have a way to display a few of our favorite ornaments. As I was doing my often-frequent occasional browse on Pinterest, I found this image..

It also just so happens that back on our summer vacation in Bend we checked out a fun antique market area in Sisters, Oregon. After a brief negotiation this beauty was ours for a small price. 

I have a thing for old window frames and window panes. I think they are their own art piece by themselves. On our honeymoon in the San Juan Islands we picked up a good size 4 paned white window that had chipping paint, wood in need of serious sanding and spotty glass marks. But we were instantly infatuated with the idea of the cool art work possibility it had. Travis spent an afternoon making it all pretty and now it sits above our dining area on the wall in a gorgeous pearly white color. 

But back to ol' red there. We didn't know where it would go or how we would utilize it but we loved the idea of having another old window in our home. After some light cleaning on it (the chipping red paint didn't look quite like our other piece did) and having it sit next to the couch, we decided about 2 weeks ago it was time to give it a fresh look for the holidays.

We picked out 12 of our favorite ornaments so that we could hang 2 per window pane spot. Below you can see how Travis drilled beginning holes along the top to put small white hooks in the frame to hold the ornaments. 

The top row of ornaments left to right: a ferry boat with Orcas Island painted on it (our Honeymoon Destination), a W (our last name initial), 2 heart ornaments from West Elm that I picked up last year - the proceeds went to art employees in Haiti, a Gingerbread man from my mom, the fun hawaiian tee shirt and sunshine (from our trip to Florida a few years ago). 

 The bottom row left to right: a gorgeous sunshine in a glass piece of artwork from my mom to me, Batman (if you know my husband - you know why this is important, wink), Weger's ornament (yes we know that doesn't look like him, but we need to get his photo in that little frame), August's ornament, Christmas tree and grocery bag ornament both from Seattle's Pike Place. We bought those the weekend we got engaged there and we've both worked in the grocery industry too! :)

Here is our fun ornament arrangement on our wall, sorry for the lighting.. (you work with what you have in apartment life)

Some ornaments got rearranged to hang facing forward and not to the side and for a little mix up variety too. We placed our little "Merry Christmas" door post up there too because .. well we just felt like it. :)

Whatcha think??? We love it and I am glad that we still got to display some of our favorite ornaments despite us not having a tree this year. And yes Mom I still have all my penguin and polar bear ornaments. :)  I know she'll read this and wonder .. but no worries they are just hibernating this winter.. 

Anyway - that got weird.. so that's our latest Pinterest inspired creation for the holidays. What type of things have inspired your creativity lately? On the search for anything in particular and having a hard time? Let us know and maybe we can help channel the inner handyman/woman in you and find some cool inspiration!