It's beginning to look a lot like. . .

I just managed to delete this entire post, after nearly completing it. Below is my best attempt at replication, but I will readily admit that it's not as good - for one thing, it has far too many parentheses, but what can you do. . .

Tres and Silas discuss our options

The weekend before last, we took Silas out to the farm (the same place we picked blueberries) to buy a Christmas tree. No one seems to grow them out here (Maybe it's too hot on this side of the mountains? Or they need too much water?), but they brought some over from the west side and set up a variety of wintry activities, including tasty treats - warm doughnuts (delicious!), hot chocolate, and cider - a fire pit (complete with fixings for s'mores),visiting alpacas from a nearby farm, and winter hay rides. We had a good time and ended up (appropriately) with a beautiful, 8 foot Fraser fir. It's a considerable improvement over the tree we had the last time we hosted Christmas, although decidedly not quite as inventive.

Our cardboard tree, complete with bodybuilder

angel and packing peanut snow

I've been hard at work on Christmas presents, but a post on them will have to wait until after they're been distributed. Here are some other things I've been up to these past few weeks:

I found a few designs/color schemes that I liked for our Christmas cards this year, but wanted to translate them into something that was my own. I bought pre-cut cardstock and covered each card with a random design of gold polka dots, using acrylic paint and a pencil eraser. Then, I added words on the front and a personal message on the back in gold Sharpie. They're obviously not as polished as either of the above examples, but I got the gold on black contrast I was shooting for and I really like how the dots almost look like phases of the moon, depending on how much paint was on the eraser. Next step: getting them in the mail. . .

cards drying

my supervisor, sleeping on the job

This is actually a collaboration between my mother and me, over the course of about 20 years. She originally painstakingly traced and cut these fabric circles to be part of a wreath; they came into my possession last year and I didn't give them much thought, until I saw a bunting covered with semi-circles a few months ago. I ironed each circle in half, zig-zagged it onto a pre-made bias strip, and presto: the wall feels a bit more Christmas-y!

I made this ball garland a couple of years ago, but wasn't quite happy with it. So, I restrung it on some beautiful yarn (this is where knowing knitters with leftovers comes in handy) and now we have a place to display our Christmas cards. I used the stocking method from this tutorial to make the felted balls. I highly recommend measuring the roving as she suggests, even if it is a bit tedious, if you want them to be uniform in size. To make the garland, I threaded the yarn on a large needle, poked it through each ball, and then pulled it out with needle nose pliers, knotting the yarn before and after each ball (an improvement over my original design) to keep them from slipping up and down the string. It can be a bit irritating dealing with such a long piece of yarn, but it's manageable. If you're like me and can't be bothered to measure, therefore running out of yarn before you've finished, it's easy enough just to tie on another piece, incorporating that knot into the garland.

In case you haven't picked it up from the above, I'm a total nerd and LOVE the onset of winter and Christmas (not so much the way it lingers on, see: February), mostly, I think, due to my own childhood memories. I hope that we can make this time of year as fun and magical for Silas too, once he's old enough of course.

Thanks for the reindeer outfit,
Great Auntie Sharon!