The holiday season is completely different now that I have children – it’s a kid-craft explosion up in here. There’s no going wrong with handmade goodness during Christmas, and I can get really into it, which is how I went from having 1 box of holiday decor joy to about 5. I just wish I could bring myself to do it for other holidays, like the hey-your-milk-is-green-and-that’s-all-I-got St. Patrick’s Day, and the totally ignored Fourth of July.
Kids like sparkles, art projects, that damn elf (1), and opening mail. We’re making the most of all of it. We trimmed what seemed like 200 snowflakes from coffee filters just for fun. They’re in our windows (2) and hung from the ceiling around the tree (3). I struggled last year trying to figure out how to display our handmade stockings without a formal mantel, but this year, I figured out an extremely, er, creative way of installing them over the fireplace using wire (4), which seems to be working fine so far. Someday we’ll actually install a mantel and this won’t be so make-it-work.
I realized how much of a sucker I am for awesome fabric after buying a yard of Marimekko’s Kuusikossa Cotton fabric when it was seriously discounted the weekend after Tom Hanks Giving (as it shall be known here forth, thx Big Bang). I set out to hang the cotton fabric as though it were a tapestry, and bought two 8′ half-round lengths of wooden trim at the hardware store, and some no-sew tape.
I like a good sewing adventure as much as the next crafty person, but if there’s a time to use a no-sew iron-on adhesion product, it’s when you’re trying to create an even, hole-free, pucker-free edge. These edges are sharp.
I figured I’d find a good way to connect the two half-round pieces of trim with super strong magnets or velcro or something more re-usable, but in the end, using the air compressor and a pin nailer with 5/8″ 23 gauge nails in it was just the ticket. I reckon I can pry them apart pretty easily if I want to change it out or wash the fabric or something.
I lined up the fabric between the half circles so that when I shot through, the nail was connecting to both the underlying trim as well as sandwiching the material. I added this wooden trim to both the top and bottom of the fabric to create the wall tapestry, the bottom pieces serving as a weight to keep the fabric hanging straight and even.
I put a few extra nails in the ends of the trim too so they appeared to be more like a solid dowel, which helped because when I went to thread a piece of embroidery thread between the boards and around the “dowel” to hang this thing, the thread caught at the outermost nail, and stopped there. It didn’t pull inwards and scrunch the fabric. This is obviously a very technical post.
Initially, it was, uh, a little bit bigger than I was expecting. It’s probably hard to tell the scale in the photo, but it’s big, and the nail up there is higher than my head. It has grown on me quickly though, and I’ll look forward to using this in our home for years to come. Marimekko forever! (Aren’t those trees perfect?)
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Love that fabric