Oh man, I let the whole month of November go by without any blog posts. My knitting projects have been pretty large-scale, but I have a few new amigurumi to share!

My November amigurumi is a turkey I named Dinner.

For December, naturally, Santa!

Santa is sitting in our entryway now, surrounded by presents.

I set him up there this morning, thus completing the holiday decorations for our apartment. Most of the decorating was done last Friday and Saturday. I went to Hobby Lobby on Friday. Everything was 50% off! How I managed to get out of there without spending every last penny I have was a miracle.

Even though I enjoy doing crafty things I feel like I’m not the most creative person. I need ideas, inspiration, tutorials, and examples – I can’t come up with any of this on my own. A few weeks ago my sister turned me on to Pinterest and I am hooked. There are so many neat ideas! My brain was full of inspiration when I went to Hobby Lobby and started filling up my cart. I knew I wanted to make an ornament mobile and some holiday shadow boxes for sure, and I also grabbed a few other things I thought were fun.

After all my Friday shopping I got down to some Friday crafting! I started with the shadow boxes. One filled with small round ornaments.

One filled with small gift ornaments.

One filled with ornaments and ribbon.

The cat gave the final inspection.

I hung the two small ones in our entry way and the big one in the living room. I think I may be in love with shadow boxes.

Then I got down to some serious crafting business to make the ornament mobile. You see, we have a cat. If you don’t have a cat then you probably don’t know that cats will deem your Christmas tree as a target to be eliminated.

2011 will be the year I decide I’m not cleaning up cat vomit sprinkled with fake tree needles. I saw a link to an ornament mobile on Pinterest by not martha (her blog is full of fun ideas). I won’t give you all of the how-it-was-done details here, you can read the instructions on not martha’s blog if you’re interested. It took a couple hours, but here’s my ORNAMENT EXPLOSION MOBILE!

OK, so it looks a little underwhelming all by itself there in my messy living room. The Christmasy effect is in full force, though. It’s just want I wanted!

I put together a few other small things in vases and bowls (really the extent of my creativity, hah) and gave the house a good hard cleaning. Our home is so full of Christmas now.

Living room – yes there is a cover on our couch. We’re old people, apparently.

Entertainment center in the living room – angels, candy canes, nativity, ornaments

Part of the dining room

Nativity

Dining room table

Entryway

Entryway

Man, those dollar store ornaments really went far! This is our second Christmas as a married couple, so we don’t have a lot of decorations yet. But I’m sure the pieces we really love will add up over the years and someday we’ll have all kinds of nostalgic Christmas decor.

Hope you’re all having fun decking your halls and sipping that eggnog!