Last-minute Christmas DIY and holidays home decor

Happy season!

I’m glad to finally trigger the season here in this little blog of ours (at last!). We have sent all our Christmas cards and hope Rudolph guided correctly the mailman to your home! I know some of them have arrived safe and sound, thanks for letting me know! *happy face*

Do you have Christmas traditions? I’m sure you do! We have at least a couple or three, one is to create a DIY each year to add into our holidays decoration. In case you missed it, check the Christmas kitty inspired light-up wreath post, and our easy pom-pom ‘Xmas” letters from last year.

The DIY for this year it’s also a very easy one to create and it could even be considered a kind of Ikea hack: A light-up frame to hold your Christmas cards. This DIY it’s not only do-able last minute but also it is totally re-usable switching the cards for pictures or any other art to keep in your home the rest of the year long.

For the DIY we used the following items:

• Christmas cards
• Twine & Scissors (& washi tape)
• Christmas lights (battery powered) with a thin cord. We got ours at Ikea, but it’s sold in lots of stores
• Tiny clothespins. We got ours at Tiger
• A frame. We used the simple Ribba from Ikea

In addition, you could improve it by adding a wrapping paper or wallpaper on the back of the frame, to make it even more festive or colorful. The clothespins can also be dressed up painting them with a color, for instance gold.

We started by choosing how many cards the frame was able to display, this helps to know how many twine segments you will need. For the Ribba 50×70 frame we used three segments.

The same day we fully decorated our living room, some classics like our Christmas log (called Biel, read here about this local Christmas tradition in case you haven’t before!) and wool scarfs and santa hats on our magic creatures. Of course, all the decoration took place with She & Him singing carols, both their Christmas albums are my favorites. Do you think we should buy another Christmas album vinyl?

I tried several approaches to add the lights to the frame, the best one was to simultaneously twirl the light string with the twine and stick the latter into place using a washi tape. First of course you will need a mark to the best place for each of the twine segments. This type of lights really help with the twirling because they are semi-rigid thus, they can hold a shape.

Juno was very interested with the lights at first but she got bored pretty soon. Sometimes I think that it would be fun I she were more interested in our Christmas decoration, but of course, in a second I realize how lucky we are she isn’t because we can have a pretty tree with even glass balls (!) intact all the season.

Say hello to foxy! Another tradition of ours, stolen from Jane (hello!), is to buy a new trinket for the tree each year. Isn’t he a handsome add-on?

The ribba frame has this little hole in the back that it’s key to hid the lights battery on the back.

And voilà! That’s all to have this new piece to display those loving Christmas messages. A little disclaimer is mandatory, in the pictures the postcards are from last Christmas years but we are changing every time a postcard gets home, we now have already 4 new cards, thanks guys!

Wish you a lovely season and Santa is generous (ha!)

Big hug!