A very special little girl on Jeff’s side of the family loooves to play school. What little girl doesn’t, right? I know I did. I can remember taking turns pretending to be the teacher with my friends and sister, loving pointing to my pretend chalkboard and and using my pretend teacher materials. Buuut enough about me, this post is about Avery. So we decided to play up to what she likes, and get her something fun for Christmas. A chalkboard. But not just any chalkboard, we painted her name on it!

It’s a little bigger than it looks in the picture. It was about 2 feet high by 3 feet wide, and it even has one of those little trays for the chalk at the bottom. But let me tell you, it is crazy hard to find chalkboards these days. With whiteboards and dry erase markers all the rage, bigger chalkboards are rare. Even with the whole chalkboard craft craze. So we ended up finding one on ebay, man do they really have everything. Here is a similar one but in green. Oh and when I was looking for one, I found these posted on ebay as well. They call them vintage. Really?! Vintage? Ummm I 100% remember using them when I was in school….soooo apparently I’m vintage now. Weird!

Anywayzzz, here is how I went about painting Avery’s name onto the chalkboard: I grabbed a couple bottles of glitter paint and letter stencils from Michaels, and a few paint and sponge brushes that I already had. Then I punched out the letters to coordinate with her name and cut them out.

I opted for the darker of the two paint colors since it would show up more. Rubellite was the name of it. I taped down the stencils and then busted out my foam brush and started dabbing on the paint. Before it was dry I pulled of the stencils. I was pretty much just using them for a guide, since my handwriting straight up stinks. Once I pulled them off I used a regular thin paint brush to fill in the stencil gaps and add more paint. When it dried the glitter looked a little thin, so I added a few more coats. I wanted this thing like the little girls in Toddlers and Tiaras, full of glitter.

After the first coat

After four coats

And here is a phone pic of Avery enjoying her new chalkboard.

It’s kinda hard to see her name in this pic. But I think it’s safe to say that she likes her new chalkboard. It looks like teaching is in her future. If not for real when she’s all grown up, at least of the imaginative type.

Along with a metallic Christmas, comes a glittery Christmas.  I love it and so does my vacuum cleaner.  But, it’s worth the mess.

I filled my three jars with silver and gold glitteryness.  For two I just dropped in ornaments.  For the third one I cut small strips of glitter ribbon (with wire edges), wrapped them around my finger, and in they went.

I also added some to my hurricanes with flameless candles.

Do you see the pine cones on the first picture?  They’re left over from Kaitlyn’s winter bridal shower.

Another simple thing I did was purchase letters from Hobby Lobby to spell Noel and glitter blasted the life out of ‘em!

This proves that you don’t have to be super crafty to create some fun decorations for the holidays!

At this point, I need all the wintery decorations I can get considering it’s nine days before Christmas and Chicago (of all places) hasn’t seen snow yet!  It’s NOT beginning to look a lot like Christams outside.  Therefore, I’ve taken it upon myself to shimmer up my house so it does begin to look a lot like Christmas inside.

This first image might look a little familiar…

I told ya I’d be able to reuse the embroidery rings from the wine party!  All I did was spray paint over the lace fabric Cortney and I had created for the wine party.  I used metallic gold and silver then topped them off with gold and silver glitter blast (my recent obsession).  I fell in love with the metallic that I ended up not using the white.

I painted one side, let it try for a couple hours, then painted the other side.  I then let them dry overnight in the garage before bringing them inside and hanging them in my windows.  Sorry for the horrible lighting, I should’ve taken the pictures during the day.  Too bad it’s dark outside when I get home from work

Since we’re on the topic of metallic spray paint, I also took two metal reindeer and splashed them with a silver metallic finish.

Can you tell I’ve been on a spray paint kick lately?  I love it!  It makes something old very new in no time.

Glitter can either look tacky or chic. But when it is done right, there is nothing better than a little shimmer. Love, amore, liebe, crush, whatever you call it, I feel it for glitter and sequins that are done well! So when glitter nail polish became a craze, I got a bit excited. The only problem was I didn’t like most bottled glitter nail polish. It would clump or go on unevenly, and the glitter pieces were sparse and too large for my taste. I like my glitter like I like my rear end, small. So I took matters into my own hands. Here is what I used to give my nails some bling: base coat, Nars polish in Candy Darling, Martha Stewart glitter in bronze, and top coat.

I started out just as if I was painting my nails with normal polish, with a base coat. Then instead of two coats of the Nars polish, I just did one. Before it dried I sprinkled on the glitter. I let it dry just enough so that when I put the top coat on the glitter wouldn’t come off onto the brush. I guess I should mention that I did one hand at a time and let it dry enough so that I wouldn’t ruin it while doing the second hand.

It looks a bit more like gold in the pics than it does in real life, but I love how the bronze somewhat matches my skin color. It makes for the perfect shimmer when the light catches it. Next time I might try the gradient glitter look with a fun color base and lots of glitter at the tips that fades to nothing (like this).