I was out doing a little Christmas shopping when I got an idea for a Christmas art project.  I hurried home and dug around in the box of Christmas tree ornaments (we didn’t use them all this year).  I found these cute little Santas. 

I also found these shadow boxes I had stored away.

All I had to do is cut some scrapbook paper I had on hand (from this and this).

 I hot glued the ornaments onto the scrapbook paper.

 And voila!  New Christmas art in about five minutes.  And best of all it was free!

      How’s your Christmas decorating coming along?  I think I’m almost done, which is good because decorating the house keeps side tracking me from shopping.  Hope your Christmas season is merry and stress free .

     It all started with me throwing out the sorry rug in my kids’ bathroom.  Let’s just say that it had seen one too many kids with the stomach flu and a bad aim for the toilet.  It was blue, brown and cream.  I was so in love with this color scheme when we moved into this house.  Now, not so much, so tossing it wasn’t too painful.  I was left with a little problem though.  The “Now What” problem.  This bathroom hasn’t a drop of natural light and the blue is seeming a little drab.  I am thinking yellow for the walls. Not a bright yellow but a soft muted yellow. If you’ve been following me for awhile, you know I have been painting the trim in the public areas of the house black.  The door is open most of the time (my kids just don’t comprehend the idea of privacy yet) so you see a good dose of black, but all the trim inside and bath fixtures are white.  I’ve decided to just do all black and white accessories.  That way everything plays nice together and when I’m ready for a change (like maybe yellow, black and white isn’t going to work) I can just change the wall color (I like painting).

     I guess that was a pretty wordy way to get to the point of this post.  The art is free because I had almost everything on hand for this project.  I picked up the frames from Roberts a few years ago.  The paper I framed is from Hobby Lobby.  It was left over from my wall of hooks project (see here).  The only think that I wanted but didn’t have was the bird silhouettes.  There was a quick and simple way around that.  I searched the Internet for “bird silhouette” and found a couple that I liked.  I printed them and cut them out.  I taped them onto the scrapbook paper, put the frames up on the wall and called it a day.  If only everything else was that quick and easy – like picking out the perfect shade of yellow.

     I love these two pictures.  They are from homes in the 2010 Salt Lake Parade of Homes.  I just am really taken with the way the designers gave the houses so much polish and pizzazz with a few really great accessories.  Granted these homes had perfect floor plans and high-end furnishings but it is the accessories that stand out in my mind. 

     My laptop has been undergoing repairs.  This is the first time in almost two weeks that I have had it back.  Yahoo.  I have spent the last couple of hours just getting reacquainted, so to speak.  I found some pictures of our old house.  This house was only about ten years old.  Everything was nice, new, and in working order, unlike our new house.  Our kids put it this way, “Our old new house and our new old house”.  So why did we move?  Well, for starters, the old house was a little over 1100 square feet and that’s after we finished the basement.  We needed more room for our growing family.  Also, it was a very long commute into the city.

     Anyway, I found pictures of some of the accessories from the old house that I left behind for the new owners.  At the time it made sense to leave behind things that I loved.  The new owners wanted them. and  I didn’t have (or I should say, didn’t think I had) a place for them in the new house.  Now, I am regretting that decision.  There is always a place for things that you love in your home. 

     I guess what’s done is done.  The  picture on the left is of the entryway.  The mirrors were all hooked together and sold as one piece at Walmart.  The picture on the right is of the master bedroom.  I bought the decorative, white, metal piece above the door at Thai Pan Trading Company.  I suppose that I can always look at the pictures I do have and reminisce.

     This is my daughter’s room.  She wanted something more grown-up than her princess posters since she just turned ten.  We found these movable, dry-erase stickers at Home Depot.  They come in a wide variety of colors and patterns.  There is no limit to how you could arrange these.  They are easy to apply and easy to remove so you could try something new every day.  They do rip so I would only let older kids go crazy with creative arranging.