Christmas Decorating Complete

We have finished our Christmas decorating! We picked out our tree and decorated it yesterday. I also finished my Christmas pillows and added something new on my "shelf-thing." Take a look...

We had to trim a few branches off the bottom so our tree would fit in the stand. The kitties enjoyed crawling under them.

Unwrapping all the ornaments. It took some time.

Two of our new ornaments. Charles bought these in Iceland. Our travel tradition is to buy an ornament from each place we visit. We have quite a collection of unique ornaments. It is always a fun way to remember all the places we have been.

Love these German houses! I grew up with these--my mom had a collection that started when we lived in Germany. My brother-in-law gave each of these to me.

My new Christmas pillows! I love the fabric on the top most. It is so cute and whimsical.

My new additions---the frame in the back just has some red and white polka dot fabric inside. The frame in front has my own creation of a Christmas printable.

Close up of my printable. The verse is a good reminder of what Christmas is really about. 

Our Mexican nativity.

The tree with a new star

Eli! We got him in Georgia at an apple festival.

Christmas Pillow Project

I have serious intentions of making Christmas pillow cases for my couch pillows. They need a little seasonal change. The design came to me out of the blue and then I found an example picture on Pinterest to guide me. I'm very excited.

Guide

I started off looking at Hobby Lobby for fabric...nothing cute. Then I went to Joann Fabrics...only one cute fabric, but I want to do a patchwork.

I finally looked on Etsy and found a myriad of super cute options. I narrowed it down the ones below. Most of them are from Riley Blake... I don't really know much about that brand except that they have very adorable options. Now I have to wait for them to arrive and then I can start sewing. I'm very excited!

I love the polar bears, penguins and Eskimo-like kids on this one.

Finally picked...

So, I finally decided on some fabric for my couch pillows. I remembered that you can buy fabric on Etsy and that opened up a whole new world of options. My husband has been poking fun at me because I just couldn't decide. He kept reminding me that it is an easy thing to change if I order or buy something and I don't quite like it.

Anyway, here's what I have decided on. I'm hoping they will look great together. I am nervous about buying fabric online without seeing and touching it in person.

The Esty store I originally found this on only has one yard left. I found it on a couple other Etsy stores, so hopefully one of them will have enough. I am making sure to buy extra in case I mess up or want to use the leftover fabric for anything else.

I decided to just do a green fabric for the ruffles instead of doing both green and yellow. It was hard enough finding two fabrics I liked enough to commit to rather than 3!

Next project--pillows

My next project is to recover some pillows that live on our couch. We were given two throw pillows by a friend months ago. They were going to get rid of them. So this project has been on my mind for a while and I'm finally going to attempt to find fabric and such.

Here's the design I want to go with (the square ruffled pillow in the front):

But I want to do the back in a brown, like this (this fabric is soft, flannel per my husband's request):

And I want one layer of ruffles to be like this color:

And the other layer of ruffles to be in this color:

I just can't decide which fabric patterns I want. I found all of these options on Amazon. I had a gift card for Amazon, but then I ended up using it to buy some new Rainbow flip flops. Obviously, I wouldn't do both a yellow and green stripe since that would be too much. I'm just being indecisive.