Christmas Tree Skirt

I know, I know, it's not Christmas season! My mom told me in January 2010 that she was going to make me and my sisters quilted Christmas tree skirts for that next Christmas. Well, Dec 1 arrives and she hasn't started :)

I offer to help, because I know she feels overwhelmed, and because I love to sew. I've never really done any quilting so I was eager to learn new techniques.

I picked out fabric I loved and we cut them into 2" strips. My mom got the pattern from a friend, and then we altered it to make it bigger (my Christmas tree is 12' tall!).

I didn't take any pictures during the construction of the project, but I think it turned out beautifully. I sewed most of the diamonds. My mom sewed them together, and my Grandma did the binding. We have 3 generations of blood, sweat and tears in this!

The original pattern for this skirt was for 5 diamonds, so the entire skirt was a 5 point star. I wanted a larger skirt, so I added a sixth diamond, but still wasn't happy so my husband and I figured that we should add sideways diamonds around the outside of the star. I didn't have enough fabric to do identical diamonds so I did some repeat fabrics and others that match. I am thrilled with how it turned out.

I love the depth that the different textures of fabric give this skirt.

Trimmed with twisted fringe.

This is the back of the skirt.

I still have scraps leftover so I am hoping to make stockings for the family throughout the year.

Lanterns

I found some awesome and amazingly cheap lanterns on Amazon the other night. I was shopping for my husband's birthday gift and came across these.

I want to hang the hanging one above our bathtub, and I'm not sure where the others will go, but I'll find a place :)


Ready for the prices?
The hanging lantern was $4.69
The blue lantern was $2.92
The amber lantern was $1.08

Fantastic deals on beautiful pieces!

Back from Florida

We are back from spending 5 wonderful days in the Florida sunshine. It was wonderful! We spent Thursday at the Magic Kingdom and had almost no lines. The kids loved it. I was surprised that my 6 year old loved Space Mountain.

On to the money savings :)

First of all, vacationing in Disney World is expensive! Luckily our hotel and flights were paid for by the company. With our group rate at the Disney Contemporary Hotel we were able to get slightly discounted tickets to Disney World. I didn't attempt to go through tours or any of the other advertised tickets on Craigslist since we didn't have time to waste and we didn't have a rental car to get places. We were at the mercy of the monorail and buses. So, we ended up saving about $35 on our 2 day tickets (over four days).
I stocked up before we left at Costco and bought rice crispy treats, fruit snacks, granola bars, and beef jerky. These came in handy on the plane too since Southwest Airlines doesn't serve meals on board. We were able to limit our buying meals only and no snacks. Ok, well we did buy the Mickey Mouse ice cream bars a couple times. There was a nice cafe in our hotel that was about $5 for the kids meals and $8-$12 for adults. They had an excellent steak salad there with fresh goat cheese I had a couple times. They also have a restaurant there called Wave which was healthy and very reasonably priced. We ate there for our one "nicer" meal.