A Vintage Thrify Christmas

New Christmas decorations are nice, I guess, but I much prefer old ones. Especially from the 1950's, and the 1960's too. Atomic decorations, kitchy decorations... I just love them. And so Goodwill and Value Village fueled my need to add to my decoration collection this year.  Here is a sampling of what I found:

pretty little angel ornament

homemade snowflakes

love this old santa

did your grandma have one of these?

my kids call this "creepy santa"

angel in my kitchen

pretty christmas mug...

and it has my name on it!!

my grandma had this set and used it at christmas

Christmas Crafts

Thanks to the emergence of Pinterest in this past year, I have become a bit obsessed with crafts. Especially Christmas crafts. I think it was sometime in July that I started a board for holidays, and it is filled with crafts for Christmas. I used to think of crafts as things like those wooden bead necklaces that your elementary school teachers wore, but I've come to realize that crafts can be modern, bright, and much more inexpensive than buying something at the designer stores. 

I have always liked ornament wreaths-- so bright and shiny and pretty. I saw one a few weeks back at Target for about $25, but I knew that I could make one for less than that. I had a foam wreath form from a rummage sale waiting to be used, so I gathered all of my unused ornaments and my glue gun. I also found a little wooden sign at the dollar store that I added to the top. I began by gluing on the largest ornaments and I just kept adding the smaller ones around and on top of the bigger ones until it looked complete.

There are still some areas of foam wreath peeking through, but I'll just head back to the dollar store and pick up a few extra ornaments.

I also had foam trees from the same rummage sale, so I decided to make ribbon trees. Michaels had lots of wired ribbon on sale on Black Friday, so each tree cost about $2.50 to make-- 50 cents for each tree form and about $2 of ribbon on each tree. I simply cut pieces of ribbon in approximately 5 inch lengths, and then I folded them in half and glued them around the tree from bottom to top.

These crafts were lots of fun and took the span of a Christmas movie to complete. Plus, the kids (well, Harper anyway) loved helping. Harper cut the ribbon for the trees while I glued it on.

Now, back to Pinterest for more craft inspiration!

Christmas Tree Quest 2011

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, we went on our annual Christmas tree quest. We go to Tiger Mountain in Issaquah to a particular farm, but when we arrived, they had a big sign on the barn that said....
"NOBLE FIRS--SOLD OUT"
Not sure how you can be sold out 2 days after Thanksgiving, but oh well... there were plenty of other farms that we could check out in the area.
We happened upon a farm way off the beaten path-- while attempting to follow the signs to it we thought we were lost, but nope-- it was just way out in the boonies. The farm was called "Crystal Creek", and wow, was it pretty! They had Christmas music playing over loud speakers and fields of beautiful Noble Firs.

We started looking in one field, then went to the middle field, then to the right field, and then all the way back to where we started again.

There were little trees, huge trees, and trees with a peek-a-boo space in the middle...

In some areas, the trees were so close together, you could barely walk between them...

Finally, we found the one--

Everyone had to take a turn sawing it down!

While Daddy put the tree on the van roof, we played with the nice farm dogs and rode on an old train car thingy that the owner of the farm had restored.

The owner of the farm, the nice gentleman pictured above in the engineer's cap, gave the kids rides. He said that if we come back next year, he will have his trolley up and running, and will give us a ride on that too.

Turkey Shirt

I made the girls these adorable appliqued turkey shirts that I saw on The Cottage Mama's blog.... Georgia is pictured in hers below, sans sissy, because Harper's wasn't quite done yet!  I added ric rac legs and embroidered her name at the top. The girls can't wait to wear them on Thanksgiving!

Thankful

I love Thanksgiving. I will admit that it's easy to get caught up in the upcoming Christmas season and look past Thanksgiving, but oh how important it is not to! I love turkey and football and family and Black Friday, but more than all of those things, I love a whole day to say thank you. I try to thank God for my life every day throughout the year, but a whole day to thank Him is just cool. This year, I saw a craft on Pinterest that I knew I had to make with the kids... a thankful turkey! His body and head are made from balls of yarn, and his feathers state what we are grateful for.

I also made these leaf coasters out of felt and hand stitched them with embroidery floss-- quick, easy, fun!

I am so thankful for sweet friends from church-- one sweet friend named Beth Rice made these adorable skirts for the girls and surprised us with them Saturday when she stopped by our house. They flare out so perfectly when the girls twirl, and I just love the tulle underskirt!

Our elf on the shelf came out a bit early this year, and guess what that naughty little elf did? He ate all of the kids' leftover Halloween candy! This is how we found him when we came downstairs one morning...

He was sitting in the midst of a bunch of candy wrappers with that smug little grin on his face. I can't say that I minded him eating what was left-- I was getting tired of the kids asking for it and decaying their teeth more and more! And the kids didn't mind in the least-- they thought it was hilarious, and they all thought that naughty elf must have an awfully big tummy ache.

I have one more Pinterest Thanksgiving craft that I am working on... stay tuned!

A Wee Bit Late

How did October get away from me? How is it that Thanksgiving is just over a week away? I guess when you keep busy, time does fly. October was quite the celebration month for the Kenee family. I turned the big 3-5, which is a little weird to me. I remember my grandma telling me when she was in her 70's that though her body kept aging, in her mind, she still felt like a young girl. I know what she means now. 35 always sounded so old to me, and in my head, it doesn't feel like I'm getting old yet! Mid-October our church celebrated 100 years, and we had a very fun celebration weekend-- bowling and a banquet, and all 3 kids sang in the celebration choir. Toward the end of the month, we celebrated Mason's 9th birthday at the park, and by some miracle, we had a rain-free Saturday in the month of October in Seattle!  Of course, the kids had a blast on the last night of the month, trick or treating around the neighborhood as 2 little witches and an angry bird. A very fun fall month was had by all, and now we are getting into the holiday spirit with Thanksgiving and Christmas crafts, which should be good reason to do a better job keeping up on this blog!

3 kids ready to sing at the celebration banquet

Proud of her banquet outfit

Kind of a date night, I guess!

9 years went by so quickly!

Witch #1

Witch #2

Who is that angry bird?

It's Mason, of course!