My Winter Wonderland

I’ve had the idea of what I wanted to do for my Christmas mantle basically ever since we moved in to this house. Motivating myself to actually do it, however, took a while. I ended up procrastinating until I just couldn’t stand it anymore and then spent the last two days rushing around trying to get it done. Oh well! It’s done now and I absolutely love it!!

I fell in love with these pictures on Pinterest and instantly knew that I wanted to create a snow globe winter wonderland!

via

In our new house, there’s a cut-out above the mantel that I knew would be perfect for my wintry scene. I gathered my materials: various jars and glass vessels, small plastic animal  and tree figurines, and glitter…lots of glitter I used some epsom salt that I had on hand as my ‘snow’ inside the jars. It was free, and it smells like jasmine, score! I also picked up a $5 white garland from Wal-Mart to fill in all the dead space and used a string of white lights we had to give it a glow.

I covered a canvas with some fabric and cut a reindeer out of cardstock to display on the wall above my winter wonderland.

On the actual mantle itself, I used a string of greenery I had on hand and filled it with a few candles on each side. Then I strung some ornaments on a ribbon on the front of the mantel. I’m in loooove with all that shiny bling-ness, especially the ones that look like little disco balls!

The hardest part of this mantle by far was finding my small plastic animals. I ended up finding them at Michael’s and they were still a bit smaller than what I would’ve liked. When I was a kid, I remember being able to find those huge, cheap bags of plastic animals pretty much anywhere, but that must be a thing of the past because I saw nothing like that in the toy aisle at Wal-Mart. Anyone else remember those?

I’m linking this up at the mantle party over at Ten June, Southern Hospitality, and Home Stories A to Z!