Subject: A Very Homemade Holiday

Melissa -

Oh my gosh - I have so enjoyed watching your master bath's transformation! I cannot wait to see the finished project. What are you doing for fixtures (light, faucets, mirrors, etc.)? I'm sure your choices will be flawless, but the suspense is killing me!

Over in the Casa de Lass, I have been busy at work getting ready for Christmas and breathing new life into my childhood relics. Would you believe this is the first year we have ever put up a Christmas tree? This will be our sixth Christmas as a married couple - and no tree! Mostly it's because we have always been gone on Christmas day, so it seemed silly to put one up when we wouldn't even be here on the actual day to enjoy it. But this year everyone is coming to us, so we decided to get into the Christmas spirit. Of course, having never decorated a tree (or our house, really), we were essentially starting from scratch.

For some reason, Christmas decorations stress me out. First, I feel like I have a hard enough time with decorating my house for the other 11 months of the year, so focusing on decorating for just one holiday has always seemed daunting. I would rather spend my money and energy on decorations I can use year-round, you know? Plus I don't know what to do with all the decorations once Christmas is over. My house is not brimming with extra storage, so I hated the idea of having to find a place to store decorations. And lastly, so many of the decorations out there are just ugly and super-commercial, which is not at all appealing. So instead I decided to make all our decorations.

First up: ornaments. I wanted everything to have a homemade vibe and give off a feeling of warmth...so what better than yarn??? I was inspired by Secrets from a Stylist's holiday special and found 4-packs of Styrofoam balls for $1 at the Dollar General and then found some cheap yarn at Joann Fabrics. Here are my materials before:

And the finished product, after:


There are 40 total. I actually got really fast at it towards the end, but I was so happy when I was done!

Next, I needed to figure out what to do about a tree topper. I didn't want to do a typical star or angel, so I decided to brand the tree as our own, like any true Southerner. I found a chipboard M at Hobby Lobby on sale for, like, 75 cents and then went and looked at the holiday floral section. Here is what I was working with:


And the after:

I really like the look of it! I hot glued each of the berries and then topped it with the crystals to add some flair. I mean, it's not perfect, but I think it's fun and different. I glued yarn across the two points of the M to hang it on the top branch and it is resting on some lower branches for added support.

Here is a shot of the whole tree:

I used some burlap as my tree skirt and added a little bit of sparkle to the tree with some silver bells (and now that song is in my head...).

The whole thing achieves what I was going for and nothing is breakable (great for curious little fingers)! Tomorrow I'll show you our stockings!

Bye bye,

Kara