Christmas Tree 09

I am going to admit something terrible: we have two Christmas trees. We have an upstairs living room (when in romantic moods, I like to think of it as the Parlor) and a downstairs living room (... the Den) where we watch tv, etc. So it wasn't any fun to be in the Christmas spirit in one place and not the other. Last year we got a fake tree for the den. It's a nice, perfectly shaped tree with colored lights. So this year, for our real tree I wanted something that was perfectly misshaped, if you know what I mean. Something with a Scandinavian feel. Like we went out into the snowy countryside with a sled and a saw.

I decided also that because we have a nice tree downstairs just waiting for all of the beautiful ornaments of my childhood, I could continue on with the "theme" for the upstairs tree and use red/white/hearts/straw ornaments. I don't know why I am always drawn to heart-shaped ornaments, but I am. I also have tons of corn husk angels from Prague and various straw ornaments from other places...including Ikea, where I found the most gorgeous straw/hearts/red garland a couple years back.

I am so happy with how it turned out. It looks so great in real life. Why is it always so hard to shoot pictures of Christmas trees? I don't think I've ever taken a good one.

Skunked

I am so behind on my posts lately. We've been working on our handmade holiday gifts like mad. All of our free time is consumed by getting things done and mailed asap. All other spare moments are devoted to applications for grad school and some seriously deliberate cocoa-and-Christmas-movie time. I need to fit that in to feel like it's December. The good news is that it snowed yesterday, so everything feels a little better.
Anyway, in the early fall I was able to get some crafting done and I remembered I haven't posted my needle-felted skunk.


He's one of the first needle-felting projects I've done. Wool roving is a fun material to work with. I still haven't used the free locally grown roving I have, but I was in a parade with one of the sheep that produced it on Friday. What a town.