One last thing about Christmas...

Yes, I know, I know, it's long gone, but embarrassingly it wasn't until today that I finally took down the stick and packed the decorations away. The stick hasn't gone into the rubbish though, as intended - the girls talked me into keeping it, so now it's stashed away with all the other junk, waiting to be thrown out when I'm not feeling so easily swayed :-)

Speaking of junk, I heard an interview with one of those clutter buster type people on my local ABC radio station the other day and felt really inspired to further cut back on my 'stuff'... until my lovely neighbour with lovely taste who manages a lovely homewares store offered me a lovely new lamp. Damn that non-existent will power! Hmm, the stick must go!

Anyway... when I took the stick down I realised I'd forgotten to finish off my Christmas posts by showing you a couple of beautiful contemporary paper ornaments that were given to us. They joined the others on the stick and have become some of my new favourites.



The first is this amazing Christmas card/ornament that my friend Stephanie posted to us. When I saw her note on the envelope about there being a 'handmade card enclosed' I got excited. Steph puts me to shame with her fantastic handmade cards each year. Considering I didn't even send many cards this year, it doesn't take much (in my defense though, your honour, I claim many late nights making presents as my excuse). This year Steph made beautiful star shaped ornaments out of hand cut stars from pages of thrifted books (in our case children's books). She sewed these together with a little message in the middle. Not to give all her secrets away, she added lovely personal touches that made them outstanding.



And the second is this one from Oxfam, made in Vietnam from coiled recycled paper, and presented on the neck of a bottle of wine. What more could we ask for :-)



So here's to creative friends with fantastic taste!

Alternative xmas tree - AKA a stick

Thank you for your lovely comments in my last post about my dress, I really appreciate them. I wish Blogger had a decent comment reply system. Surely it's not that hard to let bloggers reply to an individual comment?!! Or maybe I'm missing something.



On the Christmas decoration front, we added an 'alternative tree' to our few decorations on the weekend. It came about as we decided not to get a real tree this year because we're away for quite a bit of December, and particularly the Christmas week. We were going to borrow a plastic one from my mum and then didn't have space in the car to bring it back to Sydney. So... an opportunity for some craft arose (squeezing that opportunity in anywhere :-)



Inspired by several things I'd seen lately, the kids and I drove around parks until we found a good fallen branch from a gum tree, took it home and spray painted it silver. The girls found out how addictive spray painting can be "I want to paint everything silver mama!!"

We then each chose a few favourite decorations from the box and and threaded them on. The Mr helped me hang the stick on some string and hooks from the picture rails, I added some little fairy lights and we were done.



Each year I love opening the decorations box and remembering all the lovely things we've been collecting over the years. Opening each tissue papered package is like a little surprise :-)



It's nice to have a bit of Christmas bling around. I've been loving seeing what sort of decorating people do to their houses, both in person and on blogs. I hope you're enjoying some festive decorating too.