Merry Christmas Everyone

 

Just a quick post from me to say Merry Christmas everyone! I won’t be posting over the next couple of days as I will be busy filling my time seeing family and friends.

This year is a little different for me as it’s the first year I am having my Christmas dinner away from home and with the boyfriend's family. We spend every Christmas together, but for the past 4 years we have spent it with my family, so this year I decided it was time to spend it with his. So Christmas morning I am getting up early; I always do, as I am too excited to sleep, and going for a run. Now yes you may think that’s madness, but I do enjoy it (I swear) and plus I will feel less guilty about munching on endless streams of chocolates all day. We will then open our presents with his family and have Christmas dinner early afternoon. Later in the day Matt is driving us across the country to my Mum’s house where we will spend the night. Boxing day will be a second Christmas for us, with more presents to open, more family to see and more Christmas dinner to eat! Then on the 27th I am back to work so there won’t be much relaxing for me this year… but there never is!

I hope you all have a lovely day and get to spend the holidays’ with the people you love. I’m looking forward to seeing what you all got for Christmas in your haul posts! Have a great day!

Days Gone By| It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

 

With only a week to go, it’s definitely starting to look a lot like Christmas. I don’t know about you but I enjoy the build up to Christmas just as much as, if not more, than the day itself! That’s probably why I start my personal build up from as early as possible. I started buying presents in October, I made homemade gift tags in November and I always put up my tree on the 1st of December.

I thought I would share with you my life in pictures from the past few weeks, in particular the Christmassy ones!

• The other weekend my boy and I went Christmas shopping in the lakes. I didn’t have much left to buy but wanted to get a few smaller gifts/stocking fillers, and it’s always great to support local shops. While at Bowness-on-Windermere I got his lovely picture of the snow topped fells.
• As I mentioned above, I started Christmas shopping in October so I managed to finish buying it all quite early. I enjoy wrapping presents just as much as I enjoy buying them, and this year I made my own gift tags featuring my cute and troublesome dogs. You can see how I did it here.
• As the newbie at work I was drawn the short straw and had to write a load of Christmas cards for our clients. It took me a good hour or so as I had to use my fancy writing, but on the plus side it did put me in a festive mood!
• My gorgeous Christmas Tree! I take pride in my Christmas Tree decorating skills and love nothing more than putting the Christmas music on and trying to and cram as many baubles on the tree as possible.
• As  you may have seen from my Twitter or Instagram, I bought this adorable faux fur Russian style hat from Primark last weekend. It only cost £6 so was an absolute bargain! I love how glamourous it makes me feel!
• A little shot of my Christmas Graze box… yes I am still buying these! I find that their little boxes are perfect for snacking at work.
• Christmas George! Don’t you just love decorating your dog in Christmas decorations! He doesn’t look impressed does he?
• This is the Christmas Fairy that I have had since I was a tiny little baby and it still sits proudly on top of my mum’s Christmas Tree.
• My mum also bought new Christmas decorations this year. The one I am most in love with is the Christmas glittery Hedgehog… how cute!
• My dogs got treated to new Christmas jumpers aswell. They were going to debut them on Christmas Day but we were too excited so took some pictures of them now.
• The last picture is from June this year when my friends and I travelled around Finland and Lapland. While we were there we visited the real Santa at his workshop in Lapland. I mean you can’t go to to Lapland without seeing Santa Claus!

Have you been getting in the festive spirit? When do you put your Christmas tree up? Do you have any Christmas traditions?

A Crafty Christmas

Firstly thank you to everyone for your Birthday wishes on my previous post! It means so much to have such lovely, supportive readers and followers, and I’m over the moon that my little blog is one year old!

Anyways onto the reason for this post! After seeing many of my fellow bloggers sharing their Christmas craft ideas, I thought I would take the plunge myself. Someone had mentioned on their blog that creating gift tags out of pictures of your pets is a great personal touch to gift giving, plus a very cheap alternative! (If you are the blogger who suggested this, please let me know, as I have completely forgot who it was… a to hazard reading so many blogs!) I had also played with the idea of making my own gift wrap, but decided one craft afternoon was enough for me this year… maybe next year I’ll do more! I will talk you through how to make the gift tags above;

1- Firstly you need a willing volunteer, who will become your muse! I used both my dogs, one is photogenic (George the black and white one) the other could not be less impressed with a camera (Archie the ginger one). George even got into the Christmas spirit and allowed me to decorate him with ribbons…he’s such a daft pretty dog!

2- So after you have your picture of your pet you need to make the picture Christmassy. I did this by super imposing a Christmas hat onto each of the dogs, and writing a greeting on them. I then printed the pictures out on card.

3- I decided to add some glitter to my tags to make them a bit more special. I added glitter to certain areas by using a wooden skewer, however anything with a pointed edge will work fine.  I dipped my skewer into a PVA glue and dabbed in onto the areas I wanted to.

4- Next you need to sprinkle glitter onto the card, which will then stick to the areas that are glued. Try to shuffle the card around so you can cover all the tags evenly. Then stand the card vertically and tap it onto some newspaper so the excess glitter falls off the page.

5- Once you have added glitter detailing to all your tags you can them cut them up and use a hole-punch to make a clean hole for your ribbon.

6- You can now thread ribbon or string through the hole, so that the tag can be attached to your parcel.

7- You now have your pretty personalised Christmas tags, ready to be attached to your Christmas gifts. I think these tags add a little something extra to your gifts and make them stand out from the others underneath the tree.

So what do you think? Do you like the idea of homemade gift wrap and tags? Have you been getting crafty for Christmas? Do you regularly give homemade gifts on special occasions?