Christmas trees, cocoa, gingerbread houses, yay!

We are making the most of our holiday season, and have our bedtime hot cocoa in front of the tree when Sugarwings is having a sleepover with us.  We make it into a real party, setting out the pretty cups, and fancy napkins. After that, we read a few stories from our collection of Christmas books while enjoying the lights.

Our gingerbread house is progressing too.  Every time Sugarwings comes over, we work on it a little bit more.

This year, I actually was able to assemble the house in a decent way, it didn't fall over, I didn't need to use hot glue, it really held up and is even straight. 

It gets a LOT of layers over the next few weeks. But Christmas day, it will be a huge, amorphous blob of colorful icings and candies. Then, it gets carried down to the Fairy Berry Trail for the fairies to move into. 

Because they need to get a present too, right?

We worked on our gingerbread house while we waited for our guests to arrive.  My Utah friend, Molly, was coming to stay with us before she and I attended the Shine workshop, so I decided to have a little dinner party.  Beth and her husband, Jeff, joined us, and Sugarwings was using her best manners at a grown up dinner party. 

Molly used to be a ballerina and you can tell its still close to her heart. I found a couple of these vintage brooches and made added them to some gifts for her.

Yes, this is a brooch on a brooch.  I've been making pins from my bottle brush trees, and added a ballerina to this one for Molly.

We hadn't used the guest room in a while, it needed a good freshening.

And of course some holiday foof.

This banner is from the Romantic White Christmas class that Beth and I did a while back.  Its still for sale and has some fun projects, including all the vintage papers scanned for you to download and use.

I've enjoyed unpacking some of the examples I made for the class and using them around the house.

And I enjoyed decorating the guest room a bit for the season too.

Especially since I had helpers with the task.

This guy helped me clean the closet out in the studio.  Leave it to a little pup to find the dirt, they make great dust mops. But it looks like I've gone way beyond dust! The closet in the studio is open to the garage.  Ugh, might be worth building a barrier of some kind this spring.

 

I've linked up today with Deb at Common Ground's link party. I'll leave you with some new additions to the Boutique and Etsy.