Pintester Movement: DIY Vintage Inspired Bell Jar Ornaments

Sonja Foust, The Pintester, is having another Pintester Movement extravaganza for all of her Pintestes.

This time, since I am having my first family Christmas Tree (because, if you don't remember, I'm Jewish, so we never got to have one growing up) I'm starting early on making my own ornaments. I found a few discounted ornaments to go with my discounted faux tree that was bought for me after Christmas last year (THANKS, MOM!), but that sucker is 6 feet tall, and my 7 ornaments are not going to do it.

So I have pinned a buttload of ideas that tickle my fancy on my ORNAMENT-O-RAMA board on pinterest. But the one that I love the most, because I collect plastic snow globes, was this awesome ornament:

DIY Vintage Inspired Bell Jar Ornaments

from My So Called Crafty Life

Seriously, guys, look at that adorable fucking deer and those fancy trees! 

Unfortunately, Montana does not have adorable fucking anything... so I had to improvise.

I learned, on my wild quest through my way-too-small-for-the-capital-of-a-state city, that apparently, only very rich people ever do crafts here. There is no way I can afford most of the pins I want to try. Thank goodness for Amazon.com, but alas, having just ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon, I knew that I wouldn't have time to have things shipped for cheap to try stuff and possibly fail, having nothing to show for this pin,  so I began my mostly fruitless quest to find things to assemble an attractive, or at least funny, Bell Jar Ornament. I didn't find much, and what I found is... decidedly Montanan.

I also learned that my mother has WAY too many craft things to not have a freaking glue gun.  Seriously, she has an ENTIRE room of craft shit, and no way to stick it all together in a giant stringy finger-burning lump. Now that I have a glue gun (that I went out and bought in the middle of this pin test, after calling my mother on vacation in Florida to ask her if there was a glue gun hiding anywhere in her house) I may just end up making some abstract craft art to surprise her with.

So, after having my husband go cut plastic wine glasses with a dremel tool (he was slightly annoyed with me for forcing him to stop something else he was doing to cut them for me, so they are kind of passive aggressively uneven) I spent about 20 minutes trying to attach a buffalo to another buffalo. I finally gave up after consulting the instructions for my pin (hadn't done that yet... there were pictures... that I apparently didn't pay very close attention to) and I realized that I would need a glue gun before I could go any further, so I also gave the buffalo task to my husband, since he told me that the super glue we did have was dangerous, and went to the store.

Once I got back from Walmart with a glue gun... AND glue sticks, and other things to stick in future ornaments, the progress on the pin went pretty quickly. I am very happy with it and can't wait to put it on my tree, though I am trying to figure out what to tell my nephew should he ask why the buffaloes are attached.

I call it:

Buffaloes in Love

or alternatively:

Buffaloes who Love Playing Leap Frog

Adorable fucking buffalo. 

See what I did there?

Want to make ornaments for my tree and send them to me to be featured on the blarg? Details coming next month!

Happy Anniversary- My Wedding Cake Wreck

Twelve years ago today, I was getting married in a hurricane. And I had a really ugly cake.

Being the artistic type that I am, I, of course, had an artistic vision for my cake.  I was very into Martha Stewart at the time (I still love her, but I am a bit less obsessed.  For example, I no longer tape her shows, all of them, to watch later because I am doing other things. I think I have just seen them all now, though) and so my cake was a simple clean design.  I drew it from different angles, attached swatches of color for them to match it to my dress (which I also designed and which came out almost as bad as my cake) and took it to Pubic's Supermarket to have it made. Now, yes, I know, when you have a wedding cake made at a grocery store, it is not made by the top bakers in the country. I'm poor and my design was simple enough that I thought it would work, AND they have the most delicious frosting of all the stores in the entire United States.

So this was my design :

I went over it with the baker. Yes all green and ivory. No other colors. Just stacked. etc.

This was the cake of my dreams. So simple, yet different.  So Martha.



This, on the other hand,

was NOT the cake of my dreams.

The cake was not set up before the wedding started, which I am kind of glad of. I'd already had enough disappointment with my dress. Before I entered the reception, my mom sidled up to me and whispered, "You're gonna be mad."

Thankfully, someone managed to snap a picture of me reacting to my first view of it, while my husband laughed at me, most likely because I was saying dirty words and questioning the IQ of the decorator.

That is my "WTF is this shit!?" look.

No really, let's break this down.

Totally NOT Martha!

But it really was delicious, especially since I got my money back for it. Plus, it gave us something to eat while we sat in my grandma's house with no power during aforementioned hurricane.

I'd also like to mention that both of my parents, while walking me down the aisle, stepped on the train of my dress, almost knocking me over.  I am going to guess, for my sanity, that it was not planned.


p.s. My comment section no longer has captchas in an attempt to get you people to comment more. YES, YOU PEOPLE! =P

Oh Tannenbaum!

Hope you have had a Merry Christmas/Non-Denominational Winter Holiday/Saturday. 

 Just wanted to stop by and share the tree I made.  I needed a tree because I had to have something under which to put the presents, and a tree seemed appropriate.  It is much nicer than the tree my sister and I crafted many years ago out of a green plastic tablecloth, poster board, and  various found materials that looked almost exactly like this:

I've come a long way, baby!  Or maybe it is just because I did it myself and my musically-inclined but decidedly funny sister wasn't involved in the creative process.