Wishing all our readers a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I have to say I admire all children photographers. It takes so much patience to get the perfect shot.

Here’s what happened last year when I tried to get Christmas photos…

So not a happy camper!

We got smarter lucky this year because she was in such a great mood (ie. full belly and napped!) and even tolerated the headband, which she usually wouldn’t wear. This one is one of my favorites.

Happy holidays everyone! We’ll be back in January with new posts and craft tips.

xoxo,

Cathy and Mary

My parents have a vintage angel tree topper that I adore. It has the most darling baby doll like face and wears a simple white dress. I wish I had a picture to show you but she’s still at my parents. Since getting married I have searched high and low for a similar angel but haven’t had any luck. The ones I’ve seen have “grown-up” faces and are wearing the most elaborate velvet dresses.

A few weeks ago I found this fairy angel printable from Nostalgia and inspiration struck…

EDITED on 12/10/12: The link above is no longer available but these are similar: Allsorts Angel and CoutureCraft Angel. The one I made is assembled similar to CoutureCraft.

It took all day yesterday to make her but it was well worth the effort (of course there was some cleaning, cooking and napping in between!) She is about 10 inches tall and fits our 4 foot tree well. I love that she can be folded flat for storage.

The bottom half of her dress is drawn on with a silver sharpie and the wings are decorated with glitter. The red shirt/top was my husbands idea. I taped the shirt/top on in case I change my mind about colors next year. Her halo is a pipe cleaner wrapped in white ribbon (only because it was black) and covered with glitter. The face is from one of Babalisme’s dress up dolls from Halloween.

I strung the Christmas lights all the way to the tip so that she “glows” at night. For the life of me I can’t get a good picture of her at night but you’ll have to trust that it looks super cute!

You don’t have to be an expert in the kitchen to try this gift idea – homemade chocolate bark! I actually got the White Chocolate Peppermint bark recipe from Food Network’s Paula Deen, but I’m not a fan of white chocolate so I modified the recipe and also created other variations of it. This gift idea is ideal for friends, family, neighbors, teachers and co-workers because it’s quick, easy, inexpensive and most importantly…yummy!

The recipe calls for 2 lbs. of chocolate. But since that’s a lot of chocolate to work with, I just modified it for a 12 oz. bag of chocolate morsels so that there’s no measuring involved and 1/2 cup of crushed candy canes.

My other variations included: dark chocolate/peppermint, semi-sweet chocolate/toffee bits, semi-sweet  chocolate/walnuts & toffee. The other modification I made was to sprinkle the crushed candy canes (or toffee bits/nuts) over the spreaded chocolate to make it look prettier.

I did end up making the white chocolate peppermint bark for neighbors. It was a pretty contrast to the darker chocolate. I just put a medley of them into holiday Chinese takeout boxes and will be delivering them to my neighbors this weekend!

One of my nieces mentioned that she wanted a spa trip for Christmas. Well, I couldn’t buy her an actual trip but decided to give her (along with my other two nieces) a spa experience. So I’m putting together some spa bags filled with nail polish, manicure/pedicure accessories, facial masks and more! I wanted to personalize it as well so I included a personalized towel for each. Here’s what I did:

1) Cut out the letters of their names from cute fabric prints. I used interfacing to add some stiffness.

2) Place the letters onto the towel and pin them in place.

3) On the Singer Simple (TM) sewing machine, I used the ‘C’ zigzag stitch and size 1 stitch to sew the letters to the towel.

These turned out really cute and didn’t take me long at all…and all I purchased were the towels. I hope they enjoy and get a lot of use out of their gifts!

Stay tuned for last-minute gift ideas – Part 2!!

The day after Thanksgiving, I went into full holiday decoration mode. I strung garland on the banister, the mantle, and put up my Christmas tree. I wasn’t sure what do with with the narrow window next to my front door until I came across some snowflake garland I made last year. It was a great way to recycle an existing item and add some whimsy to the window.

All you need is: holiday cardstock, snowflake punch (or any other holiday themed punch), string and stapler

1) Punch out the snowflakes. The number of snowflakes depends on the area that you’re decorating. I decided to use multiple strings hang the snowflakes

2) Holding two snowflakes together (decorative side facing out), staple the snowflake to the string. In my case, I carefully placed the string in between the staple so that I could adjust the placementof the snowflakes by sliding it up or down.

3) Continue to staple the snowflakes to the string until you reach the desired length.

4) Hang on a rod and voila!

In addition to a window, you can hang the snowflake garland just about anywhere: on a door, above your child’s bed, on the ceiling (that would be super cute), on the mantle, etc.