Just getting started...

Goodbye Fall, Hello Winter! YAY! I packed up pumpkin mania and now it's time to start decorating for Christmas. Every year we get a fresh tree, so we'll wait a few more days before we get it (if we get it too soon, it gets dry and yucky and is a total fire hazard around Christmas time). Anyway, I haven't hauled out the giant tubs o Christmas crap from the garage yet, but I did manage to get a little bit done without them.

Hayden and I went to the park the other day:
"Hayden, want to take a walk to the park??"
"Yay!!!"
"Ok, first you have to take a walk with mommy to look at all the pretty trees"
"ok mommy, then we can play, right?"
"Sure!"
"look at the pretty trees Hayden"

"So pretty mama"

"Mama, can we go play now, I really wanna go on the slide"
"Hold on one more minute ok, mommy is busy"

"Ok, now we can go play!!"     Ha ha, my poor kids, they have to suffer for my crafting :)

Anyway, as you can see, I gathered up some branches at the park. I brought them home with me and spray painted them white. I knew I wanted to have a twiggy display of some sort, and I wanted to try to use my new flea market metal bucket thingy. I thought floral foam would be a good way to secure them in the bucket, but since I didn't have any on hand, I had to improvise. See......

I put a smaller mason jar inside the bucket first, Then, I arranged the sticks with some inside the mason jar and some tucked to the outside of it inside the bucket. I needed something sort of heavy to keep it weighted down so it wouldn't tip over. BINGO - bouncy balls. We always get a ball when we go to Old Navy so we have tons of these balls around. They were perfect to wedge in and hold the branches in place. Next, I filled over the bouncy balls with Spanish moss that I had on hand (from the Dollar Tree) and that's about it! At first, I used my wintery branches to take some pictures of my little snow globe ornaments for my etsy shop. Cute :)

After the photo shoot, I moved them to their more permanent location and spiffed them up a bit :) Here are some pics...

Here's the big picture for ya...

Thanks to Mother Nature, I have a simple, pretty, wintery, twiggy display. I like it :)
(now if only my kids wouldn't keep asking me to move it so they can see the tv. arg.)
This is only the tippy top of my holiday decor ice berg. Stay tuned!

Double Turkey Day re-cap

Are you FULL???? I'm FULL!! Ha ha. I-ate-too-much.
Just wanted to pop on to say that I survived Turkey Day #1 on Thursday with my hubby's family, Black Friday shopping with my sister at the mall on Friday, and Turkey Day #2 on Saturday with my family. It was AWESOME! Here are a few pics for ya :)

Turkey Day #1
"The Fam"

Goofball #1...we'll call him blinky ;)

Goofball #2...we'll call her spazzy :)

Crafting...we made the new ornament banner craft kit this year :)

PRETTY!!!

Turkey Day #2
Two of my cuties carving the bird...

{Some} of my cousins with my sis and I....

(note: my freakishly bright yellow shirt was actually cute in person. Pretty blinding in this pic though, ha ha)

Treats! Mmmmm! (Noah made this Turkey for my mom a couple years ago at Build-a-bear)

The kiddos....(check out Noah's sweet stance. He's in the blue and white stripes. Ha ha)

And I just wanted to throw this pic in because it looks so pretty :)

Here's a shot of how sweet Hayden ended the night after having tons of fun playing with her cousins....

Hopefully baby Oliver won't mind sharing his soft rug with his sleepy cousin :)

Ooooh, I also wanted to mention that the Water 4 Christmas Etsy shop is open. Do some awesome holiday shopping while helping people in desperate need of clean drinking water. I donated a book page ornament this year and it already sold, yay! There are some great things in there still so get your shop on :)

Thanksgiving is officially over and it's now time to deck my halls baby! Get ready for Christmas mania people!!!
Stay tuned!! 

Thankful.......

"Gobble gobble gobble ggobble, fat turkey, fat turkey. Gobble gobble gobble gobble fat turkeys are we. We're not here for living, we're here for Thanksgiving, gobble gobble gobble gobble, fat turkeys are WE!"

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!!
On this day (as well as all the other days) I am thankful for SO many things!!!!

Considering I have already paused 2 to 3 times while writing this post to yell at my healthy, energetic, happy children, I realize that I am face to face with the true happiness in life. I am SO lucky to be here in our warm home, watching these little miracles push their boundaries, learn new things, and test my patience. Amazing doesn't even begin to cover it.

My heart is FULL every day. Every day!! There are no words. To all of my wonderful family and great friends, I am SO thankful for YOU!

May your turkey day be filled with love, laughter, and a belly full of deliciousness!
CHEERS! 

(& a special thanks to Andi for making me these adorable little acorns for me in time for Thanksgiving. They will definitely add the perfect amount of sparkle to our Thanksgiving table).

"gobble gobble!"

Holiday Boutique Re-cap

Hi Friends!! It is raining cats and dogs over here in SoCal. It feels very "Fall/Winter" and I love it. We have the fireplace going and it is all cozy and warm up in here :)
I just wanted to pop on and give a little recap of my fun weekend. As many of you know, yesterday my sister and I sold our crap...I mean crafts and flea market finds at our friend's Holiday Boutique. We had a GREAT day, made tons of sales, and met some really great people! Here are some pictures for ya :)

Lisa and I brought our leftover stuff from the flea market we did a few months ago. We sold a lot of this crap (I mean treasures, ha ha).

We priced everything "to sell" because Josh would not be happy if it all came back to live in our garage :)

I sold my black caned chair (*sigh*). I love this chair but didn't have room for it. Luckily one of my sweet friends bought it so I know it will be well cared for :)

Here's a few shots of my table inside...

close-ups....

I brought along some craft kits from my sis-in-law's shop. They were HOT sellers too :)

Here are some pics of the other vendor's tables. All of the women that sold stuff were super nice and we all had a great time hanging out together.

Pam was making the most ADORABLE sock monkeys! Lisa and I bought the gray one with white polka dots for baby Oliver :)

Tracy makes the sweetest vintage inspired dresses for little girls. She also recently started blogging so I will back another time to share the link with you. She is very sweet and super talented!

The hostess (my friend and hair dresser Cathy) was taking orders for custom stockings, pillows, burlap banners, and Santa Sacks. SUPER cute!!!

There were a few other vendors too. I traded one of the other girls for one of these adorable mason jar snow globes. Isn't it adorable!!?? I just saw these featured in Country Living magazine. They have them at Anthropology :)

She was also making Organic jam so we brought home a jar for Josh. It's super yummy!!!

Cathy set out coffee and sweets for the shoppers (& vendors, ha ha)

I even managed to sneak away for a bit to go to another flea market down the street with my sister in law. She came up to check out the sale and we snuck away for a bit and got some treasures. This is what I got:

This old stool/plant stand. I love how rustic it looks. I may paint this guy a chippy red. Thoughts??

here's the top...

I also got this adorable vintage dress for Hayden for $5!!

Isn't it precious!? We are having our family pictures taken in a couple weeks. Picture this dress with some tall boots and a cute little beanie cap. SO cute :)

My last treasure was this cute yellow metal bucket thingy...

I think I will get a lot of use out of this little guy and for $2, I couldn't pass it up :)

All in all it was a GREAT event & we had a blast!!!
Happy Turkey week everyone :)

Friday's Etsy Faves...ETC.

Happy happy Friday everyone!
Noah has the day off from school today so we're relaxing the morning away, yay! I love that! Before I get to my Etsy faves, I wanted to share a cute pic of our little Indian at his Thanksgiving Feast yesterday.

My job this year was to make the "popcorn turkey"

(this was not my original idea at all. I received a picture from his teacher with a picture from last year's turkey as inspiration). It was filled with popcorn and each kid got a big scoop of popcorn serving as the "turkey" on their plate :) It was very cute to see Noah and all of his little friends in action!

Ok, now moving on to my faves...

First up today are these beautiful handmade candles from Harmony Farm Candles:

I had the pleasure to meet Erin this summer and I purchased a bunch of these candles. Her scents smell wonderful and fill the whole house with deliciousness. Holiday gifts?? YES!!

Next are these adorable candy cane striped clothes pins from Rachael's Soaps. I may need these to string up my Xmas cards this year:

I'm also thinking I need a vintage Santa apron from A Sentimental Journey this year. Ok, confession, I don't actually cook for Christmas, but still. The hostess must look festive :)

And last but certainly not least, I am loving these handmade owl ornaments from Blue Eyed Dragonfly.

She makes them using recycled cardboard from cereal boxes etc. Great (green) product, and they are adorable too!!!

I hope you like my faves this week! Etsy is loaded with tons of Christmas goodies, almost too many!! It's just awesome!!

Today is my last day to prepare for the holiday boutique tomorrow. Here are a couple pics of the things I've been working on for my booth:

I made a couple chalkboards with frames I found while thrifting: (although I already sold one to one of my new mom friends at Noah's school).

I got a cute little tree at World Market to display my pom pom ornaments (which I listed in my Etsy shop and pretty much sold all of these in this picture. Ha ha. I've been rapidly making more of them for tomorrow.....definitely not a bad problem to have).

Pom pom garlands of course...

And I also made some fun chalkboard gift tags and packaged them up with a piece of chalk:

I made them out of 3 chipboard snowflake "Merry Christmas" banners that I got last year for 75% off at Target. Cute?? Cute!

I have a bunch of other crafts in the works too, it's going to be a busy final push to get ready. I will be putting my Etsy shop on vacation mode for the day tomorrow because I will be bringing the majority of my inventory with me to the sale. Wish me luck people!!

Have a GREAT weekend everyone :)