Okio B Designs: joyeux noel

I always have a bunch of Dollar store prayer candles lying around. Each year, I try to do a new style for Xmas.

This year, I started by wrapping each candle in vintage sheet music. I picked up the glitter stars from Michael's. They are self-sticking so I added one to the front of each candle.

I added some rhinestone bling above the stars. If you remember, I picked up a French dictionary over the summer. I flipped through the pages and took out the ones that had joyeux and noel.

I photocopied the pages, cut them down and glued them to the front of each star. Just the right Frenchy touch for the season!

Jeanine

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I never realized how late Thanksgiving was this year. Quite funny that our holiday decorations will be going up before turkey day. I don't think that's ever happened before. Anywho, I was tinkering with some skeleton keys over the weekend and decided to make some into Christmas ornaments.

I chose some festive ribbon to start. Then one by one, I started adding little embellishments to each one.

I hand-stamped the Joyeux Noel onto plain white paper and distressed it a bit. You can see some Scrabble tile "plaques" I also have in the works at the top of this photo.

For the other two keys, I used a random scrapbook paper number 3 that my Mom gave me a couple of weeks ago. The 25 is a wood piece from the calendar I picked up over the weekend from a local church fair. The December is also from that calendar stash.

I used Glue Dots to adhere each embellishment, so they can be pulled off down the road and the keys can be used for another project.

Jeanine

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Have you been to Save on Crafts? They have these sweet little Joyeux Noel metal tags that are so perfect for a Frenchy Christmas touch.

I ordered them a few weeks ago and put them out over the weekend.

A few here and a few there.

And look at this adorable tea towel from my sister Kathy's Etsy shop. I love the little boy on the sled and of course the Joyeux Noel.

Jeanine

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I swear, I'm not making Xmas items yet. I swear! This project happened quite by mistake. You see, I was trying to make a bat ornament of sorts and it ended up like this:

Burlap angel wings! I'm not quite sure what went wrong with my original bat design, but the head just wasn't coming out right. So I chopped it off and have the first of many Xmas projects.

So you see, I am not purposely crazy early, it was all quite by accident! I used scrap pieces of burlap and sewed them together with red thread. I added some tea-stained seam binding so it could be hung. The joyeux noel muslin finishes it up.

I can see a bunch of these hung from our Xmas tree this year in all sorts of sizes. But I'm going to wait a few weeks before starting them. Don't want to be crazy early. =)

Jeanine

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We're planning on putting up our tree this weekend, but in the meantime wanted to share some more Christmas touches about the house. Cindy from Cottage Instincts helped with the inspiration for these mason jars:

I had filled them with some shredded vintage sheet music but that's about as far as I got until I popped over to Cindy's yesterday. I loved her jars so much that I immediately went to the Dollar Store to get some big ornaments to put on the top of each one. I love the look of the twine ribbon too.

These clogs are actually from two years ago. I had gotten the idea from Martha Stewart's now defunct Blueprint magazine. They add a touch of color to the porch.

This little porch table is still a work in progress. I feel like it's still missing a little something.

And there is an awful lot of JOY in our house this year:

More here:

And here:

Here too:

Thanks for joining me on this mini tour!

Jeanine

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I popped into my local Goodwill earlier this week and came back with a lot of goodies:

The bucket was only 99 cents.

The candle holder was $6.99 - pretty pricey for Goodwill but I couldn't resist considering it came from Target where it was probably originally double the price. I also got 5 little bottles that I plan to embellish. First makeover is the bucket:

Can you tell I ran out of white spray paint?! I had originally wanted to paint it white but I just ran out of it, so plan B of course was to paint it black. Then I stenciled the 8 onto to some scrap fabric with a fabric marker. Once that was dry, I sewed it onto a piece of burlap. Hot glue to the front and done! Right now it's holding some of my French script clothes pins.