Blogmas: Wooden + Dots Ornaments

Hello!

As you may have noticed, and I still don’t know what happened because I had plans, but we didn’t put out any pumpkins this fall. My sister did, she decorated her entire front porch with various sizes of pumpkins, but we did not. I found it very surreal, because that’s my favorite thing to do in September and October is paint pumpkins. After that, I think my body was like, “okay, we need to find an alternative fast!” because this project came out of nowhere, but it ended up becoming a new favorite of mine.

In mid-October, I started looking for birthday gifts that weren’t books (I know it’s shocking!) and I found these wooden shapes and I sort of fell in love with them and then I found ones that were Christmas related and then all hell broke loose in my brain!

In the last year and a half, I’ve been watching a lot of reels and regular videos on YouTube of dot art. I still don’t remember what inspired the find in general, but I’m forever glad it came into my life. I used it in my 3 projects last Christmas. It was only a simple red dot here and there with a Q-Tip but it was still a new thing for me and I loved it. I have been working on it throughout 2021 and I finally felt comfortable enough to use the technique in my new project: the Christmas ornaments!

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What you will need for this DIY:

• Wood cut outs – it’s important for them to be “unfinished”
• Acrylic paints
• Paintbrushes
• Dotting tools
• Damp washcloth
• Paint palette or paper plate(s)

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Before we get too into this part of the post, I wanted to show you how the ornaments came in the mail.

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They were perfectly stuffed into this cute Santa Claus box. I was originally going to get the 160 pieces but I’m glad I switched to the 40 pieces because I would still be painting right now! Anyways, they were four traditional Christmas characters: a snowflake, bell, tree and baubles. You get 10 in each stack, so you have multiple designs you’d like to trade off, you are welcome to do it evenly. If you would like to purchase this set or the others, click here for the Amazon page. You also get clusters of string for each of the ornaments, plus a small bag of metallic beads, but I did not use them.

Raining Dots

I started with the Christmas trees, and I copied the same color scheme I did with my last project, so I mixed my green with a tiny bit of blue and I love how they all came out. After finishing all 10 trees with their base coats, I moved on to the trunk and I poured a small amount of brown into my palette, and I used one layer of paint for that part. I am a lover of DecoArt acrylic paints, (thanks to Lydia May on YouTube!) I usually don’t need more than two coats depending on the shade, and I was very happy with my color choices this time around, including the yellow!

Once everyone was in the process of drying, I switched my attention on my design ideas for a few of my baubles. I knew I wanted to create a series of animals, but I’m not really good at it so I went looking on Pinterest and found a great step-by-step guide of the Fox for my friend Brittany. She was the one who really inspired this part in the first place. I continued to search for guides of the Cow and Pig, but I wasn’t able to find anything, so they were basically all free-foot sketches. After that, I stopped for the day, and came right back to it the next day.

A couple of weeks ago, I was finally able to add another selection of dotting tools. I have the smaller sizes, and I’ve been using them for about a year now and they are very nice for me to grip my toes around and make my dots, but the others are various sizes and I have been wanting to get them for a while now because I wanted to try my foot at the larger dots. I am having issues how to grip them, but I expected that to happen. I knew I wasn’t going to go all out with my designs (honestly, I had the phrase, “less is more” in my mind the whole time!) and I tried to keep it that way.

When I came back to my trees, I was ready to decorate everybody, and I used two colors: yellow and a light gray (I mixed my gray with a tiny bit of white!) and I painted the stars with those colors and would switch the yellow star with silver garland. I was smart with this; I drew out a zig-zag design on most of them and would follow the lines with my dotting tool and I really loved it! Some look like traditional Christmas trees, but there are five of them with the “walking technique” which is coating your desired tool with paint and dotting down the canvas, I love this so much I did it to my Bonsai pot in the spring! My parents saw the final tree with this design, and they love it. Honestly, everyone I’ve shared it to, has expressed the same thoughts too!

So, here are how the trees turned out.

There Goes Rudolph!

The second (or third) shape were the bells. I wasn’t impressed with the bells at all, they were very boring even without paint on them…

My thinking behind them was the golden bells you normally see on pictures, but I could not get the yellow to turn to a pretty gold and I tried like three different times and was only successful after finishing with them. I was so mad at that point, but I moved on though. Since I had 10 of these bells, I was influenced by a fragment of a carol “with silver bells ringing” I kept hearing while doing the base colors and I created the silver hue again for the rest of my bells and I thought they looked so adorable!

I left to dry overnight and I was really worried about how boring they looked, so that night I thought about adding a reindeer face on it and in my dreams they looked so cute and I was over the moon when I started sketching out how I wanted the antlers to go, but once I started doing my dots I got a little worried because the design started to look a little bit like a pair of balls and by my second bell, I became terrified at what was appearing but thankfully my mom thought they were great, especially after I put the eyes and big red nose at the end.

The reindeer/bells are definitely my favorite, even with the cock and balls antlers, they still look amazing! I did a good job on them and that’s something I rarely do when it comes to painting, is enjoy what I am creating, and lately it’s been so fulfilling to believe in my artwork for the first time.

Let It…

For the third ornament, we have snowflakes.

I think both the trees and snowflakes were the easiest to do because they required a small set of skill. You can free hand your designs to make things simple and they would still end up being very beautiful. When I began on the snowflakes though, I thought I would be able to play with my various sizes of tools, but I rarely got away from the blue tool, which is a little bit bigger than the purple tool. I basically treated the flakes like the trees when it came to their designs and used the walking technique quite a bit throughout the process.

And like the trees, I kept my color scheme pretty limited, I only used white for the base and used two different blues, but my favorite shade was the bright, neon like because it reminded me of the Frozen films. I’ll be honest, I had Queen Elsa and Princess Anna (and of course, Olaf too!) in my head all while I was working on these and I’m glad I did because it got me out of my head, and I allowed myself to make mistakes with them because I mean every snowflake is one of a kind so I just left them the way they were… well, some of them! There were 3 that definitely had to be fixed but after I was done, I basically pushed them as far away as possible, so I wasn’t able to add more dots!

The Cast of Characters

Lastly, the bauble balls were my least favorite because I knew what I wanted to do with a few of them and it scared the living daylights out of me! I got through in one piece thank God, but not without psyching myself out in the first round.

So, like I explained above while I was waiting for my trees to dry, I got started on figuring out what I wanted for three of my baubles, the rest was pretty much left until I did the base coats. I treated the baubles like the bells, as I split them up as they were painted in traditional Christmas colors: green and red. I was so worried the red would be too dark for my animal baubles, but thankfully they design held up great against the paint, and I was still able see every part.

My biggest worry now was, do I have a brush that was small enough to paint the character without creating a big mess around it, and I was thoroughly surprised as I found a tiny brush that was not only perfect for the designs, but it quickly became a favorite of mine because it allowed me to gain back some of the control as far as what I wanted to bring into each animal. I didn’t stop using my dotting tools though as I had made the eyes and noses with a small tool, and they turned out as adorable as my Rudolph/reindeers in the end.

When I was done with them, I was fairly tempted to leave the rest of the baubles plain, but I thought they looked too boring for that, and I started experimenting and I made array of different ones but I did one that spells the word “Woof” for a family friend, they have a Pittie and they recently got a Beagle puppy so as my mom told me, “it fits” for them, and then I surprised myself again but creating two baubles in a Ugly Christmas Sweater design and I’m still upset I did just do that with the rest but it was just a beautiful disaster that I need to remember for next Christmas!

Bring Me the Rainbow

My final bauble is very special because it is my nephew’s. Nolan has become obsessed with the moon and rainbows, and since I already got him a Moon phase garland for his room, I figured I needed to bring out his love for the rainbow too, so I reserved a bauble ornament for him. I don’t know why I didn’t do this with my nana’s ornament since she too is obsessed with the rainbow! Oh well, I will make a note of this for next year!

I was thrilled to do this for Nolan but I was also terrified too because I had to use the ruler to create a series of lines for each color, and honestly, this was a doozy! I was having a hard time making six, somewhat equal, lines for each dot and it was a hard task at first but once I got it all figured out, I poured out my paint on my palette and got to work on the actual dots.

This media has also become a favorite of my nephew too. He currently had two or three CDs I’ve made in the last year or so, the first one he just took home and the others I gave him because he kept holding onto them. I think in the new year, I will try to teach him how to do it so he can be excited about his own creations too! Anyways, I used my pink tool, which is the middle size and honestly, it was actually perfect for this design. I was going to use the tiny brush again to remove the empty spaces in between the dots but I stopped myself from doing it and messing the entire ornament up. Nolan was very excited to get his ornament. I don’t think he understood at first why I had given him a different design compared to his mommy’s pink reindeer, but I know he will cherish it nonetheless!

It is strange when a small thought that can appear in the middle of a sleepless night, can grow into such a huge project and yet bring so much good to a slice of the world. Homemade gifts are good for the soul. I give kudos to anyone who has a small business and fix up orders every day, because that is no small feat! As I told my nana the other day, now that I am done painting and the cards were shipped out and people are receiving their ornaments, I still feel like I need to be doing something, and I really hope it was finishing this post.

I really hope you have enjoyed reading my process with this project. It was fun while it lasted, and now I can relax for the rest of this break. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a lovely time with your family, friends and/or pets. For anyone else, have a wonderful weekend!

Blogmas | 2020 Christmas Tree

Hello!

I decided to write this post on the day, we finally get my little tree out from the depths of my closet. It’s been in there for around six months or so, we never packed up back in January because I originally wanted to get a tote like we have for our family tree to neatly store everything, but as time went on, my hope for that to happen disappeared so I finally had my mom store it up on the rack above my clothes so it wouldn’t get too damaged.

As my mom and I were removing the silver ornaments, we quickly realized that it might’ve been a bad idea to just stuff them onto the edge of the limbs, because the tops will break off pretty easily! However, we had extra hooks for our other ornaments, and my mom left me to put them through the holes myself, which still surprises me, but this gave me more time to listen to traditional Christmas music, which I knew she wouldn’t like to hear while doing the tree together. I also stabbed myself only a handful of times so that was cool!

If you remember, my tree is black – it’s definitely not the traditional tree like our big one in the living room, but that was the point. I saw the black trees the year before and I was like, “I need one!” because I thought I could find some Halloween-y type of ornaments to put on there and lucky for me, they were selling them really cheap at Menards so I really didn’t have to beg to my mom, because she thought they were kind of neat too! It’s like the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it’s not too high or too small for me to reach around the sides or the very top to arrange something later on. I think it’s the perfect tree for me at this stage of my life.

While we were opening up the totes for the family tree, we found something slightly weird and it was a blanket, that we all thought was at my sister’s place. It is a white fuzzy throw with dressed up penguins! Last Christmas, our old sheet that was with us for decades, finally gave away and we finally had to throw it out; and that is why we started using a blanket as “snow” underneath the tree. Once we finished decorating it, my mom wrapped the blanket around the cracking stand and from there, I thought I wanted to do something similar under my tree. We have a few Christmassy blankets in our house and I have one that my nana gave me, and I think it looks fancy so I thought if we fold the blanket in half to fit that section where I decorated for fall. We moved all of the autumnal stuff out of the way and even removed the sunflower rug so that the tree was only sitting on top of the blanket and it was seriously the best decision, because it made that whole space look bigger.

Besides keeping the black beauty, there was another thing I thought belonged on this tree from the very beginning, and it was the gold glitter king’s crown. My mom managed to find at our local Dollar Store last year. It was a lot bigger than what I imagined it to be, but I loved it so much that I knew there was no way in hell I was going to get rid of it. What we ended doing with it since it clearly doesn’t fit on the branches, we use it like your angel or star at the top of your tree, and I just thought it made sense to put it there every year! My nephew’s face when he asked why it was like that, was priceless! Thankfully, he and his parents put up their tree that same afternoon and we didn’t know about the other, so I thought it was a little cool. Oh, and he told me that their pets, one dog named Chipper and four cats: Samuel, Toni, Otis and Tavis helped too!

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Out of the 16 bulbs that came in the pack, I choose to use the glittery and matte bulbs but there was one glitter ball that was definitely effected by what I explained above but the cute thing about it was my nephew went into my room and snatched it off my table and my dad was suppose to fix it that evening, and so when Nolan came back into the living room with it, papaw told him to put it on the big tree since he was redecorating it all of a sudden. It’s still there on the tree I think! Anyways, I did have to use a couple of the shine-y bulbs too, but thankfully the overall design doesn’t look too chaotic and I’m happy with that!

I had decided on before I started hooking away on my silver balls, I wanted to keep things very minimalist, and I have to say, I am not about that lifestyle because mainly I’m too sentimental to do that. I barely got through packing all of my stuff to move into this house a couple of years ago. Since I am probably going to have this tree out passed New Year’s Day, I just want that area to look clean and welcoming and I think the way I decorated that space in the fall showed me that I should think about it.

As I continued my search for new decorative pieces for my room, I found a set of ornaments in mini, and as soon as I saw that you could buy a pack of them and still be dirt cheap was the best thing for this low maintenance girl. My silver bulbs are in face mini, and I am always looking for others like them. What I didn’t expect was finding these mini farm animal ornaments. Oh my gosh! They were so cute online, but once they arrived to the house, I wasn’t prepared for how adorable they would be in real life! So, I was only able to find a pack of six in the likeness of a cow, pig, and sheep! What I really love about them is that instead of using hooks, it has a little string attached to their backs and I am forever grateful for that.

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I have literally told everyone that have come to the house that all I need now are chickens, roosters, and ducks! However, I started to think about it some more later in the evening and honestly, I need a horse and goats in there too. Maybe I’ll get lucky next year and find others like them!

There was a sincere meaning for me to get these ornaments though. My mom is obsessed with cows. She has a section on her way to work and back home that have a fairly medium sized amount of black cows; and she has this thing that if there are any cows in a pond or even a good size puddle, it means her day will be good! And before anybody asks, she makes us very worried whenever she is driving and trying to find her cows at the same time! Now my nana is a lover of pigs. She told me once that she use to have a piglet as a pet when she lived in Arizona on a farm. I can’t remember the actual name of it, but ever since I keep sending her pictures of pigs on Facebook. Thankfully, she’s like her daughter and adores animals just as much. As far as I know, nobody in my family loves sheep but this was the animal that came in the pack.

The final additions to that corner are my finished “bird” project. I have been working on this statue of a cardinal for years! At one time, it belonged to my nana and papaw, but once the house had to go on sale, we got the second one. A few years ago, my dad sprayed the whole thing with gray paint and I just wanted to restore it to its former glory and repaint it in red with orange legs and make the stand into a moss-y look. I recently just finished the whole thing and I’m pretty proud of myself to finally have it look like a cardinal again. The next one is a beloved dancing Santa Claus that my papaw loved to play for all of us. He had a wide range of singing and dancing kid toys and for a couple of years in a row, he would end up receiving a different one for Christmas. Unfortunately, the one I have closest to my TV, doesn’t have batteries in it and I’m taking that as a positive because then we might lose it to Nolan too.

So, that is it with my Christmas tree décor. I hope you have enjoyed hearing of this holiday tale. Now you get to see what everything looks like as I took quite a bit of pictures afterwards.

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What do you think of my Christmas tree this year? Are you the type of person to plaster every ornament you have on your tree or do you like a little clean looking with the minimalist outlook?

Blogmas | Christmas Decor Ideas

Howdy!

Merry Christmas Eve!

For this post, I wanted to discuss some of my early Christmas decor ideas for 2019! Yeah, I know I’m going backwards for this, but there’s a reason for it. We recently got a new house, and I’ve been trying to figure out how I want everything arranged in my new bedroom. We have an idea of where the bed and TV will be placed, but everything else is a bit up in the air right now. So, I only have a blurry video imprint in my mind of what it looks like and how I’d like for everything to go!

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Whenever we’d move to a different house, my room has always had white walls. After so many years, it can get very boring looking and you just feel like you need a change and what I do is add as many posters as I possibly can! I even have some of my old artwork hanging up in my current room as well, and despite the fact that it makes the room more lively, it can still look pretty plain.

Over the years, I’ve wanted to decorate the crap out of my room for various holidays–mostly for Halloween and Christmas! A recent dream of mine is that I’ve been wanting to get a Christmas tree for my bedroom. I think I might be watching Zoe Sugg’s vlogmases a little too much because she makes me want to do stuff that I wouldn’t normally do! A part of me is torn between if this is a good or bad thing!

This month I’ve been inspired to create a Pinterest board of what I like about Christmas, the pines of the trees, bright glitter-y snow, and apparently the color red in all its glory! Later on in the year I’ll be posting some of my favorite ornaments and that’ll just add to my personality, because as most of you know, I’m a very eclectic person with many, many interests. Anyways, if you’d like to check it out, click here!

I’d like a semi-tall tree, I’m thinking maybe a 4′ tree so that I can put it up and take it down by myself. I can already picture explaining that to my parents! I originally wanted a normal looking tree, but after scrolling through my Facebook last week, a friend shared an article about the newest trend of black Christmas trees! After seeing this, I suddenly wanted one and thought that big royal purple ornaments with white snowflakes would be so pretty! I think I’d feel happy about not only myself but my new surroundings of being able to have that freedom that comes with decorating, you know?

So what about you? Do you wish you had an extra room where you could decorate it to the way you want it to, without having any judgement from others? 

Blogmas | Dear Santa Claus

Howdy!

My nana found this letter as she was going through her things back at the house in February. It was in the large stack of papers of things she couldn’t part with, and I decided to take pictures of it in case I wanted to use it for this year’s blogmas. The date on it says “1997” which means I was roughly six or seven years old and probably in first grade, so I was only starting to write with my feet. We weren’t taught how to do cursive until second grade and as you will see, my foot-writing is less than impressive to what I’m known to do now.

We had an old home video of our Christmases, and there was a tape that showed my reaction when I was probably four or five years old. I was obsessed with Barney. I remember I got like 4 things that had Barney on it. So I had a lamp, two different sized stuffed Barneys, and a blanket. This had to be the same Christmas, Blondie and I were given this soft lounge chair; it was of Simba and I imagine we fought like crazy to sit in it because somebody had to get another one. It wasn’t of Simba or any other Disney character, but it was still in the animal category. We had those well into our preteens actually!

Another thing I was obsessed with, were the Olsen twins. It was absolutely insane! I know I’ve already written a post about how bad it was, but it’s nice to know that this letter proves how much I loved them! Funnily enough, three years later it was all about Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Once I hit a certain point, my ultimate favorite gift to receive were CDs. It was on my list every year, even after I got into using my iPod, I would still ask for physical CDs and gift cards if they were going to Walmart to purchase the records. What really gets me is the middle of the suggestions is “scissors to cut paper”. First of all I was never allowed to use the scissors, hell I cannot use them because of the placements of my toes. So the fact that my mom didn’t even try to talk me out of it, is actually pretty hilarious!

If you’ve ever read a child’s letter to Santa Claus, one thing you’ll notice is that they never want to add clothes and tend to get pretty ticked off if Santa brings them any, but once we get older, our directions change. For girls, we do look forward to receiving clothes, we’re just praying that “Santa” picks us something that we generally like and nothing that “he’d” like to see us in. I think one of my favorites to get now are socks! I really enjoy fuzzy socks, they’re a little quirky but soft and easy to put on by myself! Leggings are fun to give as a gift, but I feel like whoever decides to get me another pair, needs to take a look into my closet to see what all matches the shirts before they make their decision. I have so many leggings that hardly go with any of my tops.

A few weeks ago, I posted a question on my personal Facebook page about what they used to ask Santa Claus for when they were children and now that they’re older, what they’re asking for now. I wanted to share some of my favorites with you! Some of the responses that answered for when they were younger were a pony, easy bake oven, video games, baby dolls and action figures. Now they want a day spent around with family, cooking pans, loyalty (which I thought was interesting!) experiences and something we’ve already discussed: socks! Apparently I’m not alone in my love of them.

Do you remember anything you wanted to get from Santa Claus when you were a kid? What would you like from Santa now that you’re older?