Gingerbread Love

My mom has almost finished putting the lights around the house.

This is the third year that my family and I decorated gingerbread houses together. We go to my aunt and cousin's church in Winston Salem to create our masterpieces. The lady in charge of this has bags of candy and icing laid out over 5 huge tables. You pick what you want to decorate, a small, medium, or large house or a tree, then grab your candy and icing and start working. The best part is when you are finished you can walk away and don't have to clean up anything. This is exceptionally appealing to us because we tend to make a HUGE mess!
It's fun to look back at pictures of our past creations and see how different the houses are from year to year. My mom and I usually use colorful Necco candies to create the roof but this year we decided frosted shredded wheat would be a nice change. We added lights to our house this year. I'll take a picture of it lit up and post that later.
This has turned into a fun Christmas tradition. I hope we are able to continue it for many years to come.
My aunt's house. She was pretty close to being finished at this point. Notice the detail. She even added an overhang at the front door.
Jennifer was working hard on her house. It turned out really cute. She used Necco's on her roof.
Caroline put Necco's all over her roof and then decided she didn't like it so she changed it to frosted shredded what. Her house was very cute especially after some third grade children got in on the design.
Here is my gingerbread tree. This is the second year that I have decorated a tree. I always think it is a good idea until I sit down to start and then my mind goes blank. I do like the way this one turned out. I used M&M's and gumballs on the tree. I tore apart some sour string candy and wrapped that around certain spots. I love the pretzel star on top of the tree and the gingerbread people infront of the tree. The end result was much cuter than I could have imagined.

My beautiful shower

After lots of hard work, my shower is finally in working order . We finally got the tile clean the Monday before Thanksgiving. The glass company came to install the doors on Tuesday morning. We still have a lot of work to do to finish the bathroom but at least I can shower in there now. I love the way it turned out. I was hesitant at first b/c I really wanted the frameless shower door but it was $1000 more than the semi-frameless so I had to go with the cheaper option! Next step is to purchase curtains so we can take down the beach towels that cover the window. Classy, huh?

My week of crafts

This is my favorite card this week. I went to dinner with Lauren, my best teacher friend, at CPK and then we headed to Jennifer's house for a night of card making. It turned into a long night since I made 20 cards and she made 15 but it was lots of fun. We were lucky because we didn't have to work the next day so it didn't matter how long it took us to finish.

These are the other 4 cards we made at Jennifer's house. I actually made so many cards this year that I'm ahead for next year. Yeah! I usually send my Christmas cards out on 12/1 but I haven't made it to the post office to purchase stamps yet so they are all sitting on my dining room table. Maybe tomorrow.....
I made these place cards and napikin rings at Shawntel's house. She always comes up with the best ideas. It took lots of hard work to complete these projects but they were worth it. I made 16 sets and I hope they can be used year after year. The only bad part was I put them on top of the fridge so they'd be out of the way and forgot about them until the day after Thanksgiving. Oh, well...there's always next year!
Shawntel came to my house a couple Saturdays ago and had a card class for some of my friends. Here are 2 of the 4 cards that people made. We all had lots of fun. We all need to do things like this more often. You can never spend too much time with friends.

As you can see, my life has been full of crafts lately but I've loved every minute of it. Now I must decide if I want to make gift tags or if that would just be too much!