DIY Christmas part 1

Welcome to the EAD Living blog! We are so excited to have you here. If you are a new visitor, we'd love for you to subscribe to our RSS feed and visit our sister site, EAD Weddings. Thanks for visiting and we hope you come back soon!

I’ve always been a fan of crafty projects and what better time of year to bust out your inner Martha than with the holiday season? There’s nothing like personalized touches in your home and a lot of times I choose to make our decorations instead of buying them because I love having full control over what we display. Saving money doesn’t hurt, either:)

For instance, both my husband and I grew up in homes that celebrated Christmas with yearly ornaments. That means that every year of our lives, from birth until we were ‘on our own’, is well-represented via ornaments. My mom and mother-in-law gave us all of the yearly ornaments last year and it is SO much fun to go through year by year and relive the memories. This is something I want to do for our family, too, and so beginning with the year of our wedding I’ve made a family ornament to hang on the tree. I just used a picture, some cardboard, glittery glue, some string, and any other little details I can find and voila….a yearly ornament!

2007:

2008:

And I have yet to make 2009 but I have my ideas:)

Then I got the idea of making a letter banner for Christmas, and what better word to use in the Great Artic of Wisconsin than ‘SNOW’? I used some ribbon, buttons, hot glue, snowflake ornaments, cardboard, and paper to make this baby:

I always have a hurricane vase out on display and usually it houses our vast collection of wine corks. This time of year, however, I put away the booze theme and pull out my ‘girlie’ ornaments that I used to hang on my ‘feminine’ tree before we were married. Now my pink, aqua, and purple theme is not overly welcome on our family tree but I just had to save the fun ornaments somehow:)

For our stockings, I looked everywhere for cheap ones and finally found very basic styles at Michaels. For Nate’s stocking I added ribbon, ‘masculine’ buttons, and a monogrammed pin for his initial. For mine I used left over lace from my wedding veil (which was also DIY), ribbon, sparkle glue, and another monogram:

And for my favorite stocking, little Henry got an adorable bone charm from the local pet store, ribbon, a plastic candy cane, and sparkle glue. Ta Da!

Last year I made this wreath after deciding the store-bought ones were just way too expensive. I found a plain greenery wreath on sale for 50% off, found the ‘berry wreath’ for another 50% off and combined the two with a few pine cones and ribbon to make it pop. Separately the two wreaths were puny and ugly but together I quite like!

And finally, for my last DIY project, if you squint really hard past this adorable pissed off Santa, you will see my tree skirt. I found a plain red felt skirt for about $5 and then added buttons, those same snowflake ornaments from my ‘SNOW’ banner, and glitter glue. Once we get all of our presents under the tree you can’t see it anyway, but I love when the little details show through:

And just because I can’t stop with one Henry picture, here you go: This could very well be our Christmas Card photo, don’t you think?

More on card ideas later….now I’m off to whip up some more DIY projects:)