2011 Christmas Decorations -- all new stuff!

This year I discovered pinterest and it has given me a new desire to decorate my home. Since I repainted my mantle, mirror and tile surround this last fall, I have been decorating with book print, cream, black and burlap. For Christmas I added silver and gold touches and glitter....lots of glitter!
As you know, I attempt to make Tim Holtz's 12 Tags of Christmas each year, and usually they end up in a bag until the next year when I take them out and look at them. This year I wanted to display them, so here are four that I displayed in the living room.

To make these I took 4 frames from the Dollar Tree and painted them. Then I lightly sanded them in some areas where they would normally get some paint worn off. Then I glittered them with Folk Art Extreme Glitter paint (my new favorite stuff!!) In order to keep the glitter I used on everything from shedding for years to come, after the glue dried, I painted over all the glitter with the glitter paint and I had no shedding!!! Fabulous!!!
I ironed fusible web to the back of some burlap, then ironed it onto the glass that went into the frames. Once adhered, I trimmed it to fit and put it in the frames. I tore the edges of some hymnal pages.
(This is something I really thought I could never do. I adore hymns and the hymnals I have are precious to me. But my mom found one in a thrift store that had no personal connection to me so that I could make a few crafts with hymnal music and not have any guilt. ;-D )
Then I attached the hymnal paper to the burlap with sookwang tape, and attached the tags I wanted to use to the paper with foam pop dots. I really like how they turned out.

The mantle has greenery, burlap, flowers, gold beads, and some other fun elements.The little votive holders were from an old spice rack I found in a thrift store, and the decor on the candle sticks is just some of those plastic snowflakes with crepe paper and a music scalloped circle in the center.

As for the tree, I decided to try and make all new ornaments from some I had seen on pinterest. I worked on these for weeks and still have tons of ornaments that I never even got to, but I had a great time making these!

Let's begin with the Star -- This I bought from Beverly's and I only added the pieces of sheet music inside the metal glittered pieces.
Then I got to work on some other ornaments.
These little acorns had real acorn tops and wooden bottoms. I glittered them and then painted over the glitter with the glitter paint I mentioned above.
This ornament is exactly like the decorations on the candlesticks, I just tied some ribbon to these and used them as ornaments on my tree.
Two of Tim Holtz's rosettes dies with a glittered scallop. The glittered decor in the center came in a little package of 12 from Michaels.
I adhered book print to some plastic ornaments from Walmart and glittered some tiney pinecones I found in my driveway. The holly leaves are from Tim Holtz Festive Greenery die.


These were easy to spin twine around and it was a nice little rustic ornament.

More bookprint on an ornament and I added some rolled paper roses to the top of these ornaments.
This is Tim Holtz's NOEL die cut. I cut some out of chipboard and then glittered and glitter painted them. The bookprint holly is from his Lampost die.

I hand cut the following ornaments from a template on one of the pinterest websites, called A Field Journal.



And these next two I found at the last minute at Kmart. They are part of the Jaquelyn Smith ornaments and I thought they fit perfectly. I need to put some of the gold ribbon on the tops of them, but they were so cute and I found 3 of each, so I grabbed them up!
This little area didn't get finished the way I wanted it to, but I only had so much time left. I wanted to make a Christmas paper quilt hanging for the center, but that will have to wait until next year.

I repainted the birdcage from black to cream and set some fun little items inside.
The mantle in the kitchen got pretty much the same decor as the one in the living room except I added a pair of old silver salt and pepper shakers and a silver water pitcher in keeping with the kitchen theme.




And I even gave the bathroom a quick make-over. It needs painted horribly, but there wasn't the time or money for that so I just put some burlap on the back of this old window shelf I had and put more of the blue Tim Holtz tags in each pane with pop dots.

On the little hutch I have in there, I added some decorated candles, and I antiqued an old white showman that I found in the guest bedroom closet. I tried to make him look vintage.
That's it for this year's decor. There was so much more I wanted to do, but on a very limited budget and with limited time, you can only get so many projects completed. And it leaves some things for me to work on next year, like a banner and stockings for the mantle, some wreaths, the paper quilt wall hanging, and some bleached vintage looking bottle brush trees. So stay tuned for December 2012 for the second half of my vintage silver and gold Christmas decor.