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!