DIY Lighted Letters

This is a DIY I've had on my never ending want-to-DIY list for quite a while. I saw the tutorial from the a beautiful mess girls and I knew I had to crank mine out. This project came together fairly easy, in an afternoon with the help of Travis. I rushed out to get the letters to spell "JOY," but they didn't have the complete set. I was bummed but then Travis reminded me I had the exact letters I needed in storage! Originally, I bought these letters from JoAnns for a DIY Anthro knock off project, but since they were just collecting dust, I figured I would re purpose them! 

First, with a pencil, I marked out where I wanted to drill the holes for the lights and then when I was sure of the spots, I marked it with a sharpie. I didn't worry about the sharpie marks because I knew I was going to be painting over them later. My handy man then drilled out the holes for me. He chose a drill that was a little smaller than the lights so that the lights would fit snug in there.  Next, because the letters were enclosed, we took the backs off to expose the holes. This is when I decided to paint the letters a Martha Stewart acrylic gold. They took about two coats of paint and they dried fairly quick.

 After the letters dried, we strung the string of lights through them, making sure we started at the bottom of each letter and ending back up at the bottom of the letter. We did this so we could string garland in front of the letters, when up on my mantel, and you couldn't see the string of lights going from one letter to the next. I kinda had to play with the excess string to get it to stay inside the letter. I didn't want to tape it down with electrical tape because I knew I wanted to disassemble this decoration for easier storage.

Pretty simple DIY that doesn't take much time but definitely makes a statement and can be done for any season!

PS: Check out the rest of my Christmas decor in this post!

T + E decorate a Christmas tree

We have been together for almost five years now and every Christmas we have spent together we have decorated a tree together either at my grandparents house, or Trav's parents house. This is one of the Christmas traditions I absolutely love. Susan, Travis' mom, has four or five huge bins full of boxed ornaments. Each year, since they were born, Trav's parents gave him + his two brothers ornaments. I love that tradition and looking at all of the ornaments they were gifted. They all have their own "themes," and Travs happened to be hot wheels for awhile there. I find it very ironic that since our first Christmas together I have made Travis an ornament and gifted it to him when we were decorating the tree at his parents house (this was before I was aware of his parents tradition of gifting them ornaments each year!).

We had so much fun decorating our first tree. The ornaments on our tree are a mixture of Trav's ornaments from his mom, some of the ornaments out of his moms amazing collection, the ornaments I have gifted to Travis and then some of the ornaments from my mom's stash. I love that our tree is a mixture of ornaments from both of our families and each of them brings back memories from past years.

Here is a video of us decorating our tree. It's filmed with a GoPro Hero 3 and we obviously need some more lessons in videography! Nonetheless I love that we have a wonderful keepsake to remember this wonderful tradition by.

Christmas Decorations 2013

This was the first year I was able to decorate my own space. It's really hard to get into the holiday spirit being a graduate student, because of the stresses of finals and projects that come with the end of the quarter. In the middle of finals week, Trav and I took a study break to go pick out a tree. This was the first year we picked out a tree that would be OURS. We brought it back and put lights on it. It stayed this way for awhile until we got around to actually decorating it. I had so many ideas flowing through my head for decorations I wanted to get done, thanks pinterest. This lit up JOY was probably my favorite project, and a DIY post on this will be up soon!

One of the projects I was really anxious to get done were these embroidery hoops. A quarter yard of two different types of flannel, cut to size, add pretty ribbon to the top and the white space between my fire place and mantel had a pretty (and cheap!) decoration to fill it.

The fourth of July

Independence day around here was kinda thrown together, but I was surrounded by family and thats all that matters. Cousins came over and we spent time in + out of the pool. 90% of that time in the pool was occupying my younger, 2-year-old, strong willed cousin Charlotte. Once she had enough my (other) cousin and I took full advantage of the gorgeous weather we are spoiled with here in Southern California and worked on our tans. Homemade strawberry shortcake and brownies were made, BBQ'd veggie burgers were eaten (by only my aunt + myself, I don't think I could get the rest of my family to touch a veggie patty with a 10-foot pole), fireworks were watched and sparklers were played with.

xoxo-Elise