A Homemade Christmas ¦ Dried Flower Decorations, Garden Grown Ornaments & Vintage Finds.

Well hey there friends! I sure hope you're having a great day out there in your gardens. Well today's video is going to be all over the place. So here's what happened. This morning I decided to film on my old vlogging camera versus my iPhone and I've just been using my iPhone for the past few years. But when I looked at the footage that Nick and I took the other day The colors just seem way off and I was even turning down the exposure and I just felt like this is not what the garden looks like. So I grabbed my old vlogging camera. I'm getting ready to make like a holiday decor video and I realized that there is a full garden tour on this camera that I've never shared with you before. So here's what I'm thinking. We'll do a vlog for the first part of this video and then the second part of the video will be that never seen before garden tour in early June and I'll just set that to probably music since I didn't talk at all during that period of time. So what we're going to do this morning, it's early November, I want to make some lamb's ear Christmas ornaments. I want to finish up the garden library Christmas tree. I have a bunch of dried hydrangeas in the basement that I want to add to this tree. And I also want to decorate the front of our house for Christmas. I'm going to use those large True Tone bulbs on the Instant Boxwood Hedge this year, and I think that's going to be really fun. So far I've put some sugared berries and a few Christmas balls and pine cones on the tree. I picked up two of these garlands at Hobby Lobby. I think they're supposed to be sugared cranberries, but they're two different colors. We've got the bright red and then a deeper red, and I like the contrast there. And I just kept them as garlands and wove the garland throughout the tree. So let me show you what things look like in here. And then I need to bring out the vacuum cleaner because can you see what's going on on the carpet? We've got hydrangea confetti everywhere. This $20 footstool that I found at a local antique store is my inspiration for the garden library Christmas tree this year. I just wanted to pick up the colors from that footstool and emulate them in the tree and I'm so pleased with how it turned out. Now I'm not sure if I should pick up some more of these velvet berries at Calico Creek and add them to the mantle or not. Um, let me know what you think about that. I think it's okay like this. You know, we could add a bow in the middle, but I don't want to obstruct the view of this beautiful wooden rose. So maybe this is actually fine. Maybe it just needs a few more light strands. But we've got our beautiful ornaments that we just found in the basement, we've got the glittering berries, we've got our beautiful hydrangeas, we've got firelight hydrangeas, limelight prime hydrangeas, strawberry sundae hydrangeas, so many beautiful varieties, pine cones, and that's it. That's really all that's on the Christmas tree this year, and I think it's just lovely. This year I'm going to take my time with the dining room Christmas tree. I want to create all the ornaments for this tree just with things that I have on hand and mainly things from the garden. So let me show you what I created so far and then we'll make some more of these lamb's ear ornaments together. These are so fun and easy to make. I made those with my grandma growing up. So so far I've made these miniature wreaths. My mom came over yesterday and we crafted together. She does a lot of pressed flowers, so we have pressed hydrangeas on just a slice of wood. I did pick up these wood slices at Michael's. I think it was four for maybe three dollars, and then just added a nice ribbon bow. So there's those. Moss, pine cones, cinnamon sticks, just a little bit of everything on those. And you know And you know what's so weird is I like them. I don't know. Do they look weird to you guys? I don't know there's something about this that I really like. In fact I like these balls better than I like this standard straw flower ball. This is just an old styrofoam ball that I've used over and over again. Here's a little Christmas tree I made with pressed hydrangeas. Just added the pressed hydrangeas to this wooden tree and put some Mod Podge on there. Oh man I've got a bunch of glue gun strings that I need to clean up. This is supposed to be a tiny lamb's ear topiary. I could probably work on this a little bit more. It would probably be better with a cinnamon stick as the trunk and maybe a smaller ball. But as I say, it's just what I had on hand. And this cork is from honey that my mom got in Cape May, so that's fun. I think I showed you this, right? This is our lamb's ear ornament. Then some pine cone ornaments with some cinnamon sticks, dried lavender, and a straw flower. And I think what I like, yeah I think I like these the best. And these aren't glued together so they can be disassembled whenever we tire of them. I just got little bundles of boxwood and arborvitae outside. And then I added to that a little bit of statice and a dried rose. And then I tied a ribbon around it. Two cinnamon sticks in the back. And I think I'll just push that into the Christmas tree. So we're just going to add to this Christmas tree slowly and it's going to be so much fun. And I love the fact that we're not going to spend any money at all on this tree. And this is just an old tree. We usually have this in our living room but we are getting a new living room Christmas tree this year so that'll be fun. Anyway let's make some lamb's ear ornaments now. I think I'm pretty happy with how the tree is looking so far and honestly I think I like this tree better than I like the library tree. What do you think honey? I like all of your trees equally. Good answer, good answer. I did want to talk a little bit about how long the lamb's ear ornaments last for. So the ones that I used to make with my grandma, I still have some of those and they're probably 35 years old at this point. Now the color does fade slightly and they turn I would say more of a green brown over time. But in my experience, they do last for decades. The only mistake that I've ever made when making these is putting my glue gun on high. So if you have an old school glue gun, like I use my grandma's glue gun, and it gets really, really hot, just be careful because it can burn the leaves. And you can almost see that in the topiary that I made. It almost blackened the leaves ever so slightly. So that's the only problem that I've had with those throughout the years. I did make a few other ornaments since we spoke last, like I made this gomphrena wreath. Oh no, it's falling apart! Oh no, don't look at that one. Edit that out. Okay, edit that out. Anyway friends, I'm just trying to make a completely free Christmas tree using dried flowers from the garden and so far so good. Hey, if nothing else, it's fun, right? All right, I'm going to go outside now and decorate the instant boxwood hedge with those big C9 bulbs that we got from True Tone last year. So for the front yard, I'm just going to take these big lights that we had on our vintage Christmas tree last year and I'm going to put them on the front. of the boxwood hedge. I'm not sure I have enough to do the inner portion but let's do this outer portion. Oh you can't even see it with the shadows. Let's do the outer section and see how far we can get. Well I was able to make it around the front of the boxwood hedge with the lights that I have but now I've run out so I think what I'm going to do is see how much it will cost to light the entire boxwood hedge because I think this will look a lot nicer if I can also light the interior.