Christmas-y Crafts

Some pretty porcelain ornaments from Have You Met Miss Jones and my collection
of German wooden ornaments jazzed up our mantlepiece this Christmas.

It's December 13 and I've only just started any form of Christmas crafting. Talk about missing the post boat. Noone got a Bonnie-crafted gift this year. But I have managed to do a little crafting today, just to get me into the swing of Christmas (as if all the mulled wine wasn't doing that already!)

our music-themed Christmas wreath pretties up our awful navy blue front door.

I whipped up this wreath to hang on our apartment door and it took me all of 72 minutes! Seriously high on the instant-gratification ratio. :)

Step 1: find wreath-like shape. You could form it out of newspaper, cut out a cardboard doughnut, or buy a foam wreath. I managed to put all our cardboard in the recycling, so didn't have any to hand except the inner tube from the Christmas giftwrap... I unrolled it, stapled the ends together to form a circle and Santa's your Uncle - a wreath-like shape!

Step 2: Cut out lots of leaves from an interesting paper. You could use sheet music like me, or an old book, or some pretty wrapping papers. This was 3 sheets worth of music and made a wreath about 30 x 30cm.

Step 3: Get out the hot glue gun and start sticking the leaves (previously folded in half, to add some dimension) around the wreath, working your way around in one direction to get that smooth flow happening.

Step 4: Add a few Christmas-y trinkets, in this case some oven-dried orange and lemon slices, (or leave it plain if you like that look) and a ribbon to hang 'er by and you're done!

And here's my attempt at a Christmas tree for this year. I don't feel like I can splurge £20 on a little tree that I only need for 2 weeks. Had I been more organised and bought one on December 1, I'd feel a bit better about, but £20 for 10 day's worth of tree wasn't doing it for me. So I went outside and gathered a few branches. Bound together and popped in a pretty Ikea pot they're the perfect foil for our collection of ornaments. I'll definitely be more organised next Christmas and will buy a lovely fresh tree - the smell is heavenly - but this will suffice for this seriously-disorganised Christmas.