There Should Be 34 Days In December

I am lucky enough to be paid to do arts and crafts at work at this time of year.

I start off the holidays like this:

150 handmade cards for our clients.

Then I send out my personal cards... but not handmade!
I am way over it by the time it gets to making mine.

Then, over the weekend I tackled my own decorating...
and it starts like this:
First and foremost, for me... I need a Noble Fir tree.
It is my preference for Christmas trees.



(sorry Kelly, this is my one and only picture of the process)

Usually I wrap the trunk of the tree with that cheap garland in either silver or gold
 and then wrap lights on top of that.
But I skipped that part this year and went ahead and just
wrapped the trunk with clear lights.
I want the eye to be drawn in and that is why that garland is good to put there first.
It reflects the light good.

My husband likes colored lights
and I prefer the clear and amber lights on the branches.
This year, I went with the colored ones... but if I am using the clear
and amber lights I take both strands and
double wrap the branches.
With the light strands I always wrap around each branch
going out and coming back in
 and diverting on to some of
the sides to each branch also.
It is tedious but it really shows off the tree.

Next will be the ornaments... I will be back with more photos and
my strategy for adding the ornaments to the tree.
Oh yeah, also,
Over the weekend my girlfriend came over and
we made Christmas cookies!
I had the oven on all day!
Her recipe for sugar cookies is wonderful...
I really think that the icing isn't even necessary.

(did I mention shampooing carpets too.. it never ends, I tell you)?

Patty brought a newly finished quilt to show me too...




Look at all the hand quilting! Doesn't it look like a snowflake?
I am amazed... the photo doesn't do it justice, we were having camera troubles that day.
Darn it.

Patty might not like this picture... but sorry, I'm not cropping it!

Here is the whole quilt! I love the  fabrics in this quilt!

The pattern is called Triple Crown.
I have made that same quilt... and quilted it myself... so, you can understand why I didn't take it out of the

closet to show her! No way! I really need to kick it up a notch on my quilting.

Oh, the reason why I stopped with the tree lights is because I had two little glitches...

one, half of one strand isn't working... I don't know how that happens, they were in prefect order when I took them off the tree last year, wound them up and placed it in the baggie... how can it not work

and the other reason was... somehow, I ran out of lights, I had to go get one more strand!

I hate that when that happens!

How is your decorating coming along?