Loving this Time of Year!

This time of year is my absolute favorite. I love all of the time we get to spend with family, and I love shopping for all those Christmas gifts!

We were able to spend Thanksgiving with my parents this year, since they only live an hour away. We did a lot of eating, relaxing and playing some mean games of Uno. Darren was able to play football with my brothers on Thanksgiving, and then spent the rest of our vacation extremely sore and feeling old.

He did feel well enough on Friday to help my dad get their Christmas tree out of the shed and put up in the living room. I sorted through all of the ornaments and found the few that I knew were mine and brought them back up with us on Sunday. We then promptly got our little tree out and put all of them up. It was so fun to decorate our apartment and make it look all festive.

Yesterday, after running a few errands in the morning, I pulled out a few projects that I started last year in Idaho, but never quite finished. First to finish, our Cinnamon Ornaments! I pulled out some puff paint and added a little color to these wonderful smelling tree toppers.

Here's a photo of them hung up on our little Charlie Brown tree...

Don't mind the birthday presents under the tree...Darren's turns 28 9 days before Christmas!

Next on the to-do list was to hang the wreath I made last year, and then promptly put in a closet. I LOVE how it looks on our front door!

I loved putting everything up and can't wait to start all of our advent calendars on Thursday. Especially since we just got a new one in the mail today from Darren's mom!

Finished!

I had the day off today, so I decided to break out the sewing maching again and make my stocking!

I'm so glad that I decided a few months ago to do this project. I'd been trying to figure out what we were going to do for stockings for the rest of eternity. Darren has the one he grew up with at his parents' house, and mine is at my parents' house, but I thought it'd be nice to have something that was just ours.

I'd looked online for patchwork stocking patterns and couldn't find any that I really liked. A week or two after we moved into our apartment I saw a JoAnns ad for McCalls patterns on sale for $1 that week. I got online and looked at their selection of patterns, found a few that I liked and headed down to the store. I figured that $1 was a steal of a deal (and it turns out I was right), so I looked at a few and settled on one that also included a tree skirt, a wreath, and some ornaments (M6453). I doubt I'll ever do the wreath and ornaments, but I figure in a few years when we actually get a big tree I'd tackle the tree skirt.

It took a few weeks to get the fabric, but once we did it was pretty much all I could think about. I altered the pattern and directions a little (I wanted both sides to be patchwork), but I am SO happy with how they turned out.  

I had to pretty much pry Darren's out of his hands on Monday. I think he'll be pretty excited to hang it up after Thanksgiving :)

Christmas Project . . .

My kitchen counter has looked like this since about 9 am:

Good news though. One down!

One more to go...