Loving Heart. Happy Home.

I am so happy that I can finally post our mantel! Christmas is our favorite time of the year, our mantel, I feel, shows that love off. I have been preparing this Christmas mantel for weeks, and I am not even ashamed.    Like our Halloween mantel, our Christmas mantel had to be within budget. Dollar Tree is an awesome store for budgets, and I found myself there many times. Most garlands that I found at craft stores, and even Walmart, were a little high on the budget, so I decided to check out Dollar Tree as a last resort. I am so glad that I decided to check it out. It didn't disappoint! I purchased four garlands, at the price of $1 each. You can't beat that! Now, I know they're not the fullest, but that was why I purchased so many. I was able to cut three of them in half to fill up the mantel.

For our holiday mantel, I wanted to find reasonably priced candlesticks to go on one side. It's actually fairly difficult to find candlesticks at a good price. Now I know this is a long post for a small project, but to me, no project is too small! I explored a few stores, but most of the candlesticks were at least $10. We needed three, so candlesticks at $10 a piece would be more expensive than the whole Christmas mantel!  So off to a few local thrift stores I went! I decided to upcycle candlesticks from the thrift store with some paint. We have quite a few around us, but there is one that it my absolute favorite. CCA has stores around called reStore. They always have new things every time I visit. This time, I was on a mission to find a few candlesticks. I went down every aisle, looked over every item, until finally, in a few different places, I found three candlesticks.  Now, they were nowhere near perfect. In fact, they didn't match and they were definitely s...

I know, I know. It's early to start decorating for Christmas, but hey, I'm only about a week early! Lately, I have had an itch to decorate for Christmas. It is my favorite holiday after all. This year, I wanted to go for a silver and white theme. Do you know how hard it is to find cute garlands in stores? I went to every craft store! Don't get me wrong, they had plenty of cute garlands, but none that matched my "vision."  So, I decided to create my own garland. I remember seeing these garlands in classrooms as a child, and it seems to still look cute to me! It's simple to make and adds a touch of cuteness.

I know, it's almost Halloween, but we all know how crazy life gets. Anyways! Little A has been very interested with all things scary lately. Boys, what're you going to do. Because of his new interest, he has been super excited about Halloween this year. Honestly, I think it's just because he can understand Halloween this year, you know, being three years old and all. And since we don't really celebrate Halloween in the traditional sense (we dress up and go to fall festivals), I wanted him to have something in the house that he could enjoy looking at. While he's bigger, I still didn't want him having access to the decorations, since he's a hoarder. No, seriously. The kid can hoard. So really, the only option was to decorate the mantle, where he couldn't really reach anything. Which isn't a bad thing since I love decorating, and this year we actually have a mantle! A few weeks ago, I went to some stores to check out the Halloween décor. I went to f...