Guest Post ~ Making a Christmas Ornament

Hello!

So there are two really exciting things about this post!  :)  The first exciting this is that this is my

.....wait for it..... 

One-hundredth post!  

So..thank you to all of my faithful readers & commenters & lovers for reading!  :)  

The second exciting thing is that today I am featuring a fellow blogger and this is her first guest post!  

How exciting?!  

I certainly hope that all of you follow the blog "My Beautiful, Crazy Life" because Breanna is just precious.  We've been e-mailing back and forth for a few days now and I just think she's great.  

{And I'm not the only one who thinks so!  She just won The Versatile Blogger award!  So yay Breanna!)

Anyway.

She has done a tutorial for all of us on making Christmas ornaments.  :)  So...here's Breanna.  

Wedding Cards

Even though my husband and I had a relatively small wedding, we still received a ton of wedding cards.  

So many cards.  

And they were all so beautiful.

Each card was full of love, hope, well-wishes, and promises of prayer.  All of the cards were beautiful and delicate and bridal, and I love them.  

However, I had no idea what to do with them all!

Homemade Holiday Sugar Scrub

You all have seen the recipes for homemade sugar scrubs on Pinterest, right?  I, personally, loved the idea and decided to make some as Christmas gifts.  They turned out SO great that I had to share the recipes I used with you.  :)

Fabric Garland

Some of you may recall that we have a TON of fabric left over from our wedding.  We used a lot of burnt-orange in our wedding, and even had a 50 foot aisle runner made out of orange iridescent fabric.  Whoa, that sounds tacky.  It wasn't.  I promise.  It was gorgeous.  Here, look!  (I know that it's hard not to look at the bride & groom...but check out what we standing on!  And all of these pictures were taken before the wedding...before most guests arrived, but we did have a small wedding.)

Fabric Garland for their Christmas tree was one of the crafts Ashley made for their tree.  I admit, I had pinned a few different fabric-garland ideas, although I had never seen the garland on a tree before.  I loved it!

I took a piece of fabric down to the living room.  I am sorry the picture turned out so blurry... but I laid the fabric out on the floor.  Do you see the lines from where it was folded?  Those are the lines I cut along.  I like the longer pieces of fabric for garland over short, stumpy pieces.  It is all a matter of opinion.

My husband (bless his heart) and I took turns cutting up about 20 million strips of fabric.  Each strip of fabric was between one and two inches wide, probably.  :)  It's all about what "look" you like best.

Then, we took turns tying the pieces onto the hemp string!  I made a loop at each end so that it would be easy to hang and hold on to.  Here is my hubs being a silly goose after we finished!  :)

We put it on it tree....but it looked really dumb.  Since we used longer pieces of fabric, the garland kind of covered up the lights on the tree.  That's what we get for using extra long pieces of fabric & not tying them to a strand of lights!  ;)  But, we feel like our creation will be very versatile and we can use it year-round!  :)  Here is the finished product at the end of the stair case...for lack of a better place to put it as of last night.

We spent about two hours working on it and we started & finished it all in one night.  It was very simple.  :)  We both love it!  It is also a unique way to preserve some of our wedding cloth.  Hooray!  

So, tell me.  Do you have any ideas as to what we could do with this strand of fabric garland?  It can't stay where it is...we use the upstairs of our home fairly often.  My craft room is up there!  :)  I'd love to hear your ideas!  

XO's! Thanks for reading!  Merry Christmas!

DIY Chalk Container

As per the usual, I found something I liked on Pinterest and decided to make it myself!  :)  My favorite crafts are the ones that I can make without having to buy anything new.  So, here is my pinspiration!  :)  And after that is what I came up with for our home based on this picture.  

  

Source: reneweduponadream.blogspot.com via Amie on Pinterest

To make my own chalk canister, I started out with a tin can that once held canned tomatoes.  Am I the only one who obsessively saves all of the tin cans I could be throwing away?  I hope not!  They are so versatile and I encourage you all to start saving them!  (I'm such a pack rat..)  So anyway, the can I used is short and fat.  This shape works best for the type of chalk I have (which are also short & fat.  My adorable husband bought the wrong kind, but it's totally okay!)

    

I washed the can first.  I usually take the paper off of my cans, but I left the paper on this one so that I wouldn't have to use primer before painting with chalk.  Ultra sneaky.  :)  

I do not have spray paint chalkboard paint, but I do have the regular kind!  I love it!  I've used it a TON!  I painted the paper label with chalk paint by using a sponge.  :)  Two coats was all it took.    

I ordered some liquid chalk pins off Amazon.com and they are amazing!  I used them to write the word "chalk" on my can after letting it dry overnight.  *It's very important to let the chalk paint sit & dry COMPLETELY before writing on it!*

My chalk was once stored like this in a cabinet.  : /  It was very sad, messy, and pitiful.  It was also ugly and forced me to keep my chalk hidden!  How dreadful!  

BUT NOW...it is stored in this beautiful tin can!  :)  

I set it next to the HUGE chalkboard that's in our foyer.  You can find the Fancy Chalkboard Tutorial by clicking here!   It's my first tutorial, the first DIY project we completed for the new house, and it's also my FAVORITE thing in our house!  :)  I hope you'll check out that post because frankly, this picture is horrible. I apologize.  But you can see the little can at the bottom!  :)  

 As always, thank you for reading!  Have a great day!  :)