Hope you're all enjoying your holidays! Regular posting will be back on Monday!

Oooh, look at this completely unnecessary skill I learned this weekend!

     Bonus points: not only is it totally unnecessary, it's hysterically time-consuming! Like, twenty minute chunks of my life, ske-plosh, down the drain. Don't get me wrong, the end results are super pretty and impressive. It's just that in hindsight I realize there are probably more exciting ways I could have spent my Friday afternoon. Oh well, now I can whip this out at parties to impress people with my papercraft wizardry. Check it! I present to you: wrapping paper sea-urchin-type pointy spike bows!

     They're so, so pretty in person. Way more of a statement than any old squashed little bow you dug out of your attic five minutes before the party. I used this tutorial here, so I won't go into detail on how I made them, since that blog does a really good job of explaining it. The only thing I did differently was use hot glue instead of Elmer's, because I do not have the patience to hold eight hundred little cones of paper together while they dry. Once I'd gotten the hang of it and switched to hot glue, they took about twenty minutes each from start to finish. So I wouldn't recommend planning your whole wrapping scheme around one of these on every present (unless you're just feeling like a few hours of something crazy tedious would mellow you out -- no judgment, you do you), but if you need a real show-stopper for one present, then yeah, definitely give it a shot. They're not hard to assemble once you get into a groove. So hey, why not? 

Gift wrapping and gift snacking!

     Christmas is creeping up like a sasquatch in the night, so I finally got around to wrapping up some presents! 

     I put it off for way too long every year,  but I actually love wrapping presents. Not so much the whole bit with wrangling the paper and trying to keep all the pets from stepping on it and putting holes in it before you ever get a chance to slap on the first piece of tape, but the tying up with ribbons and bows. It's satisfying to turn a bunch of cardboard boxes into pretty little parcels for everyone to appreciate for approximately two seconds before they tear into it with the might and ferocity of a hungry raptor. 

     In other festive news, I whipped up a beauty of a cake the other night for my dad to take to work to celebrate the holidays! Check it out:

     It's a simple two-layer 9x13 white cake (I always recommend good old-fashioned white cake whenever you're feeding a group, because nobody doesn't like white cake. And if they do, keep an eye on them, they're weird), frosted with whipped buttercream (mmmm, buttercream) and decorated with ice-like sugar sprinkles and a big red fondant bow.  And it turned out pretty nicely, if I do say so myself!  

Friday Fail

     Because I know we all like to laugh together (you are laughing with me, right?) at our failures sometimes, I thought I'd kick off the weekend with a classic tale of "this was a way better idea in my head." 

     Whilst I was digging around in the attic for Christmas decorating supplies that weren't already earmarked for another location of the house, I came across a set of big plastic lighted snowflakes. Oooh, I thought, those would look so pretty in my closet window! See, the window in my closet is the kind that's round on top and right in the center of the house from the outside, so it would look really nice to have something lit up in there. So I dragged them downstairs and asked around about whether they had a predetermined place. Nope, they were free for my designs! So, with my mom's help, I got them hung up in the window using a combination of tape, command hooks, and yarn. From inside, they looked so pretty! Then I went outside...

Sorry for the picture quality, I can't hold my hands steady enough to take a better night shot, and I don't have my life together enough to use a tripod. 

     Light-up blobs! They were totally indistinct clusters of lights. It kind of looked like maybe I had started to hang lights in some other configuration, but they were too badly tangled so I left them that way. I had to admit defeat on that one. So I took them down, and I've been brainstorming what to put there instead. I have an idea involving a rope light, a wreath, and some string lights, but we'll see where it ends up. 

     Enjoy your weekend, everyone -- hopefully it will be failure-free for you! 

The Christmas-ification, Part II

     I told you I wasn't done adding holiday spirit to my room yet. Apparently my method is "more lights, more sparkle!" until everything feels appropriately cheerful but still doesn't involve too much stuff (mostly because I don't want to have to put a million things away after Christmas, because that's depressing). 

MORE LIGHTS

     I needed to add some more lights because the room was a little lopsided -- all the lights and all the blue on one side, and all the pink and...lack of lights? on the other. So I wrapped another strand of blue lights up with some sheer shiny ribbon and blue tinsel to create a garland to drape over my desk, and added a short strand of white lights to my mini-tree (because obviously the tree needed lights. This is a fact). 

     Ahhh yes. That's the cozy glow I was looking for. 

MORE SPARKLE

     First I did a simple switch-out of the decorations on my wreath, re-using the white flowers that were on it before and adding a few festive bits and bobs to give it a frosty winter look. 

     I have a weird affinity for things like those little silver glittery grass-like sprigs because they remind me of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. That's the only part of that story that really stuck with me, actually. I couldn't care less about the sneaking out to dance with cute princes or whatever, but I always loved the trees with silver and gold leaves.

     The final addition to my room came in the form of a box of 12 glittery blue snowflakes (I feel like there's a clever segue to be made here based on the number twelve, but I can't find it, so...just pretend I'm cleverer than I am). I sat in the floor with these in my lap for a good long while, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with them, until finally inspiration struck. Ten minutes and a bit of tape later...

     I love this so much! The snowflakes tucked geometrically into the polka dots remind me of a Nordic sweater somehow. It also vaguely reminded me for a dark second of how in the nineties everyone had horrible wallpaper borders all over their houses. Why was that a thing? Bleh. 

     Anyway, with the snowflakes up and the lights a-glowing, this room is really starting to feel cheerful and festive! I'll have to enjoy it while I can, because Christmas is coming up way faster than it has any right to. Or maybe that's just me getting older and inheriting the grand tradition of insisting that time goes by too quickly. 

It's beginning to look a ... little...like Christmas?

     I started the Christmasification of my room yesterday! I started out light with a couple of little changes here and there (mostly because I don't have many decorations that match yet -- I want to hit up the pink candy-themed Christmas section at Hobby Lobby), but it's enough to get my holiday spirit going. Have a look at some of the changes I made!

     First up, I swapped the roses above my windows for some silver, white, and blue tinsel, plus some blue string lights ($2.50 at Target!).

     The blue lights are really pretty in the dark, too. 

     Then on the other side of the room, I added a mini Christmas tree! I've had my eye on this little white tree with iridescent pink bits for a while, and it was the last one on the shelves at Target today, so I figured I'd go ahead and get it before it was gone. 

 

     I also stuck a sprig of wintry-looking berries (?) in the vase on the left and wrapped some extra tinsel around the bottom of the storage box there, just cause. The pink unicorn isn't actually holiday-specific, I'm just really into unicorns, and it kinda makes sense there. 

     The last little change I made was to wrap some silver garland around my wall mirror and stick a few bows on the corner, just so I'd have a little extra holiday-ness right before I go out the door. 

     I dunno what that face is, don't even ask. 

     Anyway, so that's what I've been up to, but I'm just gearing up in my quest to make everything cheerful and cozy! 

Happy Holidays!

Hope you're all enjoying the holidays! In celebration of the season, here's a drawing I made of what  I'd like to be doing: playing in the snow, building a snow Tardis and snow Doctor. Alas, we don't get nearly enough snow here to make my icy dreams come true.

Regular posting will be back soon!

I'm a real hoot at Christmas parties.

Here is a gif I made illustrating exactly why I'm such a joy to be around during the holiday season. 

A little Christmas cheer...

     Don't get your hopes up too much, I said a little. As in, the small amount that can fit into my room. It's not like I could set up a full scale tree in here. (Or could I...? No, I really couldn't.) I thought I'd share the few Christmas touches I've brought into my room, just for kicks.

     Small Item of Cheer Number One: I spent an embarrassing amount of time cutting out paper snowflakes, then hung them above my windows with some silver ribbon (luckily it was kept out of reach of the stupid cat). I think they look pretty nice against the dark blue curtains.

The worst part was the folding, because I watched Martha Stewart do it first and in comparison to her beautiful crisp folding mine looked like a tipsy monkey did them.

     Small Item of Cheer Number Two: This little arrangement of pine and boxwood sprigs that I carefully curated (read: hacked off of plants in the yard) and decorated with sparkly snowflakes like one of the little snow fairies from Fantasia that I wanted to be SO BADLY when I was little. 

Once again, I feel like Martha Stewart would laugh at this. But you know what, I TRIED, MARTHA. I TRIED. Also this smells really nice.

     Small Item of Cheer Number Three: I decorated the top of my desk with some icicle lights, white poinsettias, and festive ribbon (this ribbon's too big for the cat to swallow, in case you were worried). 

I was kind of hoping this picture would turn out dim enough that you couldn't see all the junk on my desk. Oh well.

    
     Oh and here's a close-up of Small Item of Cheer Number Three-and-a-half (it's so small it doesn't get it's own number), the sparkly gold things and bows shoved into a squatty little vase nestled into all the ribbon and lights.

     These little touches of Christmas in my room make me feel marginally less like a Grinch. And they're not too obvious, which is important because I keep my room warm and constantly-humidified like a tropical jungle, so it'd be weird if it was too over-the-top Winter Wonderlandy.