Christmas Bows

Now that we're home from our trip, it's time to decorate for Christmas. I'm not much of a decorator. In fact, I haven't decorated the past two years, although that's partly from circumstances out of my control. Last year we were in the NICU and the year before that we had just moved into our house/it was still being remodeled. 

So. This is the year we're doing it up festive!

G bought a real tree that's been hanging outside in the snow. We thought about putting it up before our trip, but someone would've needed to water it every day, and we didn't want to make that much work for G's parents, so we waited. This past weekend was too cold, so the tree is going up in the next couple days during our "heat wave". 

In the meantime, I can do other decorations. 

This is my favorite Christmas wall hanging I got at one of the Immanuel silent auctions. It would hang on a thumb tack in my apartment during the Christmas season. G is morally opposed to a thumb tack as a hanging apparatus, so that limits where I can hang this. I don't want to just put a nail in the wall for a short time.

There's a place in the stairwell going downstairs where I normally have a cross picture frame hanging. I figured that I could swap them out for Christmas. However... I have the cross hung with two thumb tacks. 😆 

The frame is light enough (no glass, just wood and ribbon), I knew it would never fall down and G would never notice the thumb tacks. But the way the ribbon for the cross is, it needs two tacks instead of one. I knew the thumb tacks would be obvious with the Christmas hanging, so I decided to add a bow at the top big enough to cover the thumb tacks. 

Youtube was very helpful for this. I found a video with slow instructions on how to tie a double loop bow with ribbon. She recommended chopsticks taped to the counter at the width you want the bow. 

A few minutes later, voila! I attached the bow to the Christmas hanging with a twist tie.

Here's a close up of the bow. Can't even see the thumb tacks. 😎

 ...Although you can still see a couple of old thumb tack holes from when I had messed up on hanging the cross picture. 😬