Christmas in August

Sadly, most of the decor I did for Christmas was store bought.  Since Indy's birthday was on Thanksgiving, I didn't have much time to prepare for Christmas, as I suppose will be the case EVERY year.  But I did manage to find really beautiful store bought decorations that I complimented with my own crafts.  I really love arranging a house for the Holiday season, it makes me feel all sentimental.  Here is the one craft I did for Christmas.  Paper Snowflakes!

This was my trial snowflake.  I'd never made snowflakes growing up, but always wanted to because they look so pretty and cool to me.  I used this How-To to learn my method as well as just searching on youtube for videos of people doing all the folding.  It's great to vary where you make your cuts and the size of the snowflake.  They all turn out different every time!  Just like a REAL snowflake!

I did about 12 snowflakes total in different sizes, using different types of paper.  Here you can see (on the far left- being cut off) I used a piece of plain paper, the large snowflake in the middle is a brown paper lunch bag and the tiny one is an old teaching hand out.  I really love the way the words looked on the paper.   I chose a woodland theme, so the colors and went really well.

Here was our cozy Christmas Corner.  The wreaths were nailed up onto the wall, but I can't find that pciture for some reason.  I made the garland out of tree trimmings and yes, that is a real fire :)

Some of the woodland decorations upclose.  These were all store bought, but they were absolutely perfect for the vision I had in my mind for what I wanted for our Christmas decor that year.

My son, Indiana in his Christmas swag.  So cute!  Another thing I did was save a lot of the packaging from Christmas gifts I had purchased for people online.  The gift directly behind Indy has a thick band of this really cool paper packaging they use... I don't know what it's called but it looks kind of like a honeycomb.  Of course, everything is enhanced by ribbon and jute string.  It's amazing how special a gift can look when you use real ribbon instead of those pre-packaged bags of ribbons that don't even really match your wrapping paper!

This was such a great Christmas!  I can't wait to decorate for this year!