House Updates, Christmas Decorating, and Our Dress Form Mannequin Christmas Tree

Once again, my new computer is in the shop. It's really really hard to post without a computer (I'm using a phone). It's even harder to get good photos when you can only use a phone (because there is no computer to plug the real camera into). But I didn't want to wait until it is fixed to show you this. 

Ellie and I made our dress form Christmas Tree this weekend, and we are thrilled with it! 

We cheated, of course.

The "real" ones use a wire form and the designer individually ties each branch of fresh greenery  to it to form the skirt. Instead of that tedious and time consuming method, we bought a fresh little tree (about 5' tall) and placed a hollow-back dress form over the front of the tree, tied it in pace with ribbon, and decorated it:

The main difference I see is that in the ones where you place your branches individually, the skirt angles downward more. As our tree settles and ages, I'm sure that will happen.

The shirt is wide white ribbon. We made the belt with ribbon and holiday greenery from Michael's. And the neck garnish is the same - ribbon and florals.

Next, this little project. I saw this very old and inexpensive light fixture on eBay and bought it knowing I would un-wire it (not sure if that is a word, but I mean pull the wire out altogether) and use it here with real candles. I love it, but again, hate the photos because I can't transfer the ones from the real camera to the computer so I am stuck with phone photos alone. I honestly don't get why people say the iPhone camera is good. Anyway, here it is:

I really really hate how yellow my phone makes everything, but I do like the candles from this angle. Please excuse the pillows, too:

Finally, long-time readers will recognize these. I buy each child a snow globe each year - a tradition I started when Bobby was 6 weeks old.  He now has 16 and Ellie has 11.  I arrange them every year in a different place. Ellie collects nutcrackers, so we combined them this year. I like how the ceiling light shines down on them:

Thanks for reading and I'll see you as soon as I have a computer again :)