Wishing You All...

Merry Christmas!

May Peace be your gift at Christmas and your blessing all year through! ~Author Unknown

Christmas Tree Garland

I can finally say that it‘s time to get ready for Christmas. (Well, the shops over here have been doing it for ages – they‘ve started just after the 1st of November, but I refuse to believe that this is right – I don‘t want to spend half a year waiting for this holiday!) The 1st of December is the perfect date – it still leaves about 20 days for the hardest bit – finding presents… Meanwhile I have started on my decorations.

This year I had several ideas how to decorate my parents’ Antique shop. I’d love to capture the look at feel of vintage Christmas. I’m sure my mum would love it too, but she gets carried away and we end up with lots of stuff that I wouldn’t use. We already have a white Christmas tree, lots of candles and two white deer, which look quite nice, but I’m afraid that more decorations are coming and I won’t be able to stop them piling up on the tree, beneath the tree or somewhere near the tree…

What I had in mind was some handmade decorations that people would have used in the old times, when they didn’t have fancy baubles, or some old toys that would remind people of their childhood. Well, I’ve started with a handmade garland that I’m making using dried watermelon seeds and little beads.

I must admit I had this idea a month or so ago (the Christmassy stuff in shops must have stimulated my brain back then), so I have prepared – I’ve collected lots of watermelon seeds, that have dried nicely and it’s really hard to stick a needle through them now!

If you want to try this out all you need is seeds (any chunky ones should do, just make sue they are soft and not dried, this should help you to avoid little holes in your fingers), little beads, a needle and some thread. Also some paint, that you could make your garland look gold.

I promise I will post some more photos so that you could see what the garland looks like on the tree. Meanwhile I’ll continue trying to stick my needle through the dried seeds… as it’s not going as fast as I would hope it to be…

Making Presents

I’m keeping an eye on quite a few blogs and it seems that more and more bloggers are getting into Christmas spirit. Just like me!

First snowflakes and dark evenings are signs that the magic holiday is getting closer and closer…
I love this period and the whole anticipation – I have so many ideas for decorations, presents and treats… I hope I won’t run out of time!

I knew I wasn’t the only one with Christmas on my mind when a few days ago my friends started talking about swapping Christmas presents. It was decided that this year we should swap presents that we have made ourselves (don’t know if this decision was triggered by the economical crises or the fact that handmade things are getting more and more popular, but I said “yes, let’s do it!”). We haven’t agreed on a budget for the materials that we’d need, I think that someone even suggested that: “the present has to be made of something you already have at home”, so I guess it will have to be something not expensive, but original…

I could make lots of things (blowing my own trumpet or what???), but whatever idea I had, I realized that for most of them I’d need to go shopping – need yarn for a scarf, need a wooden box or a frame if I want to decorate them using decoupage technique, need canvas for a painting…

Anyway, after several days of thinking and looking through my crafts box I decided that I’ll make an effort to create a bracelet from small beads! I’ve never done that before, but… always wanted to.

It turns out it’s not that hard, but you need to be patient. I’m using a lid from a shoe box – made small carvings at each end where the threads go and then just work with a needle.

At the moment my only concern is what to do with the threads on the ends once the bracelet is done. I guess I will have to look into it…

New Year's Resolutions

This Christmas period seems to have just disappeared without a trace. I’ve been preparing for it for ages and then suddenly we had our Christmas Eve dinner, unwrapped the presents and… and it was over.


The tree is still up, it will remain ornate till the 6th of January, but the mood has changed – it’s time to be preoccupied with New Year’s resolutions.

To be honest every year my goals are huge, but it doesn’t matter how much I try, most of them are postponed as things like getting a house built can’t happen in a day, but if you live in Lithuanian it might take you probably up to 5 years (bureaucracy I’m afraid)… I’m keeping my chin up and hope that in 2009 we’ll at least have a pond dug and some trees planted, oh and having our own fence would be marvelous! The rest is simple – loose some weight (if it’s so simple why didn’t that happen in 2008?), travel a bit more (hard to achieve when one doesn’t feel well on a plane) and finally figure out what I want to do in this life (don’t ask me how old I am as this really gets me down – I desperately need to find something I’m good at).

Right… So that not to get too depressed I wish you all a Happy New Year, let it be the one when at least half of your dreams come true! And I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the 1st of January would bring us real winter with plenty of snow for my dog to enjoy (no wonder her name's Aliaska) and for me to take photos of.

Almost a Christmas Carol

A few days ago on someone’s blog I noticed a counter that said – it’s 10 Days to Christmas! Only ten days? Can this be true? It really shocked me as I still haven’t bought anyone’s presents, haven’t planned when we are getting the tree or what we are going to put on our Christmas table!

Usually I’m a lot more organized than this, but this year I was the busiest I’ve ever been and on top of that managed to get a cold that locked me in the house for at least 5 days… I’m also under a lot of pressure as the presents, that Santa is going to bring me this year in corporation with my boyfriend, are already safely hidden somewhere in our wardrobe. I can’t believe he’s done that to me! It’s him who has to sweat on the 24th of December trying to get the last bits in the crowded shopping centers…

Yesterday I decided to pull myself together and at least sort out the Christmas cards (on several blogs I noticed I’m not the only one, who still hasn’t done this – it’s not nice, but knowing that the others are also experiencing stress encouraged me!). Anyway, I was really glad that at least the cards and post stamps were bought last month. So I made a list of friends who deserve a card, tried to write something personal for each of them, licked the stamps, placed them nicely on the envelopes, added addresses – I felt I was working in a factory! Then suddenly I realized that one of my friends has moved to another place and I haven’t got her address… After remembering that she has sent me a card and that the new address would be on the envelope I just put her and her boyfriends name ‘Jurate and Paulius’, thinking that I will add the rest of the information in the morning. Now have a guess – did I remember this?

Oh, no! It wasn’t until I got a text from this friend when it suddenly daunted on me that a red envelope that says ‘for Jurate and Paulius’ will never reach its destination… By the way, the text arrived after about 45 minutes after I’ve put the envelopes into the yellow post box (yes, in Lithuania they are bright yellow). So how daft is that? I bet it’s 10 out of 10! I then also remembered an advert for post services that I’ve seen in some magazine – ‘we always deliver your mail, unless it doesn’t depend on us’ and it had several photos of envelopes: some with illegible addresses and one with just ‘for grandma’ written definitely by a child on it.

So here I am, encouraged by someone else’s stress, talking photos of my Christmas cards that are ‘done’, so that I could brag about this, and later on feeling completely disorganized…

Simple Christmas Projects – Beaded Poinsettia

I can finally feel Christmas coming – we’ve had our first snow, shop windows glow in different colours and the main square in town has a huge Christmas tree. It seems that despite the economical crisis, that we keep hearing about on the news, everyone is getting ready for the festive period and there’s nothing better than the anticipation of the big event.

There’s still 4 weeks, seems like a lot of time, but this waiting can bring its own pleasures - I love decorating, baking little biscuits, buying and wrapping up presents! So having flicked through a lot of magazines, looking for inspiration, and searched through my head what else I could come up with I decided to make some beaded flowers – poinsettias.

Last summer I was asked to become God mother to my nephew and had to buy a candle for his Christening. I wanted to decorate it in small white beaded flowers. As I had never done this before I looked up on the internet and found an example of something I had in mind on this website - http://www.craftbits.com/

For this project you will need: small red, green and yellow beads, thin flexible wire and a bit of patience.

Instructions: We’ll have to make several red and several green petals – as many as you want. So here we go - cut a length of wire around 30cm for each petal. Thread a single bead onto the wire and slide it into the centre. Push one end of the wire through two more beads. Push the other end of the wire through the same two beads. Now you have the second row of your petal. Work the other rows adding one bead more than the previous row or one bead less – that’s how you can shape your petals.

Be creative – petals don’t have to be exactly the same, some can be bigger, the others smaller. You can also vary the colours – add green beads to the red petals to make your flower look more natural. If you want your poinsettia to be yellow in the middle just finish a few petals making the last petal bead yellow. After you’ve added the last bead just twist the two wires together making stems. Once you’ve made all of your petals twist their ‘stems’ into one. That’s it.

I hope you enjoyed it and that you will find a place for your ‘home grown’ poinsettia – decorate your presents, wreaths, Christmas table…