Christmas Inspiration

I LOVE PINTEREST!  This is where I get most of my inspiration these days.  It especially helped when I was looking for ideas to decorate the McCabe Marlowe house last month.  I love the "new" rustic Christmas decor that everyone is keen to these days.  Here are just a few pictures to get those gears of yours turning for a new kind of Christmas inspiration:

McCabe Marlowe Home

Here it is! Our masterpiece.  I'm so excited to show you all of the hard work that went into decorating the McCabe Marlowe house in Downtown GR.  Our team (me, Ondrea, and Melissa) from my display and visual merchandising class got inspiration from just about everywhere but a big helper was Pinterest.  Enjoy! (oh! and I foolishly forgot to take a picture of the entire room so I apologize!)

More Paper Flowers

I just watched Julie and Julia with my mom and it inspired me to blog!  Right now I have been decorating a historical home downtown Grand Rapids for my Visual Merchandising and Display class.  It has been a wonderful experience and I will share much more later.  But I decided to make some paper flowers to put in the living room there and have been making them the last 2 (or so) hours and my back aches.  Every time I focus too hard on something small my back tenses up.  But the results are worth it!
These are the same flowers I made for my tea party this summer and I thought I would end up with much more but I only got 6.  Anyway a step by step tutorial can be found here.

Began folding

Pom Pom Cowl part 2

I made another scarf!  If you want to know the instructions and what my other pom pom cowl looked like just go here.  The only difference to this one I made is I wanted it a bit longer so i could double it up so it ended up being about 72 inches long before all sewn together.  I had to make some alterations (yay for seam rippers!) but it ended up turning out great.  Take a look:

Pom Pom Cowl

I wanted to share what I made this week!  I found a great tutorial of how to make a long pom pom cowl at purlbee.com and it turned out great!  I actually ended up throwing it together before work and it took about a half an hour.  The only things I did differently is used cotton instead of linen and only put pom poms on one side of the cowl (so I just hemmed up the other side).  You should really check out the tutorial because I'm even going to make another one because it was so simple!

Floral Design

I just finished my 5 week floral design class and when i first started I was a bit worried because we had to buy all of our own artificial flowers and supplies.  We also had 3 hours a week to fill with arranging flowers and I had no idea how I would use that time!  But as I went along I realized I needed all the time I could get.  I had so much fun those 5 weeks, I wish we had the opportunity to do more arrangements.

We had to a traditional arrangement even on all sides for the first arrangement.  My arrangement is on the left and the inspiration on the right.  This one sits on my nightstand.

Crafty: Take 2

So summer is officially done with school starting tomorrow and I thought I would update all ya'll on the crafts I have started (and some finished!) this crafty summer!  I'm so glad I got to do so many things with all of my free time.  Hopefully I will keep knitting, sewing, crocheting, painting, and gluing through the rest of the year.  I included some links to patterns so I hope you have fun crafting too!

My tea party dress. Just made it up as I went.