The Girl Plan a Surprise for Abbie

The girls found out that Abbie will be coming home much sooner than expected. She should arrive back home Monday or Tuesday!  =D 

Abbie just loves Christmas, so Lena and Nance decided to surprise her by getting the tree up and the living room all decked out for Christmas! 

 I hope you'll go visit my Flickr page so read their little story! You can find it HERE.

In this picture you can see most of the Living Room set up.  On the left hand side is a large wooden bookshelf that houses the start of an adorable snowman collection!

Then comes the Christmas tree!  I decided I wanted it to be fuller, so I used several packages of 12" long pipe cleaners that are the same style as the branches in the tree.  I also added a stand of battery operated lights.  There are only 20 in the strand, and I might decide to add another strand to it at some point.  But for now I think it'll be fine.

Next up is the fireplace.  This seems to be Snowball kitty's favorite place to hang out! I found this lovely circular wrought iron piece at a local store Friday morning.  It was on clearance for $2!!!!   The mirror is part of a set I found later that day at the thrift shop.  there are about 8-10 mirrors in several different sizes.  Thankfully they are plastic, made from plastic similar to CD's.  And why is this a good thing you ask... well because when I grabbed the one that looked like it fit and peeled off the paper backing (they are self-adhesive) and pressed it in... it went all wonky and fun-house-mirror-y.  The darned thing was like 1/16th of an inch to large!  AND it was wedged in tight so I couldn't pry it back out.  I grabbed one of the smaller extra mirrors and discovered that I could use scissors to carefully trim it down.  So that's what I did. And this time I squeezed out a thick layer of glue and just let it gently rest on top of that.  I didn't attempt to press it down at all! LOL

Also on the fireplace are a pair of silver toned wire trees that I picked up at the Dollar Tree.  They were supposed to be tree ornaments, but I used my wire cutters to trim off the hanging loop at the top, as well as the loop and bell that were at the bottom.  I grabbed a couple of 1/2" wooden blocks, painted them black and drilled a little hole in each one.  Personally I think they look fabulous!

The girls are currently trying to decide whether to decorate the tree in all the cute candy ornaments Abbie has been collecting, or to use the lovely snowflake themed ornaments instead.  they are kind of leaning towards the snowflakes, since snowflakes go nicely with Abbie's snowMAN collection.  Hopefully they will decide tomorrow and get started!