Peace On Earth

I can explain why I haven't posted in almost a month. I've been busy. Busy with a few things. I am going to post pictures of our Christmas party tonight that I did the decorations for, even though there is other stuff to post! I just wanted to show my mom the pictures without putting them on FB, so sue me :).

Transforming a stake center is really hard. It is a GIANT gym. We tried to use cheap stuff we could make for the decorations.

 The table runner was burlap with doilies glued in clusters on top.

 The snowflakes were made by members of our ward. I sent out an email asking for snowflakes and passed out paper at church. In the end, we had over 500 snowflakes, some of them were seriously breathtaking. When we received so many, I was so touched I was ready to pledge my loyalty to the Kensington Ward for life. They were made by children and clearly some professionals! Here the snowflakes were glued to helium balloons so they looked like they were floating (shout out to Sandra J. who did this at an activity with leaf cut-outs, what an effect!)

 The dahlia flowers were made of pages from books we bought at the library for 50 cents. Here is the tutorial, and we loved them so much we have two hanging in our front room. On a side note, when Lane came home from school and saw me cutting out pages from the books, she was horrified "WHAT are you doing MOM??" When I told her she first asked me how she thought the authors of these books felt and then told me that even though she liked the flowers, she was "still a little disappointed in you, mom." I am now a little concerned she will learn about Hitler burning books and think of me. :)

I didn't think they photographed well in the gym, so here's a better shot.

 Along this wall we used brown wrapping paper and glued doilies (we bought 1,000 of them for 5$ on ebay!) to make it look like it was snowing. We also made garland of our ward snowflakes by gluing them together and then onto twine that we strung from the ceiling and bball hoops.

 We hung more dahlia's and flowers made from coffee filters on the snow wall.

 The kids did a nativity play on the stage, so we also decorated that.

 In primary I brought white shapes and blue paper for the kids to glue their own winter mosaics and we used them to decorate the wall as well.

 Lane's snowy hill.

 I also attempted a donut tree. I feel like I could have done better on this one, but it was still fun. Guess how many donut holes? 100!!! I had estimated 50. 

 Lane came and helped me before the activity. I know I can be called a nerd, but I really enjoyed making things at night while Chris was at night law school. It really made me happy to make our Christmas party special. I had some great help and it was really fun!