Life as LeeAnne Knows It: Happy Awkward Holidays, Vol. 2

I considered subtitling this post "Modge Podge and Glitter" instead, but in the spirit of "We Bought a Zoo," I decided to go with the most descriptive subtitle. The refined art of lacking subtlety or mystery is underrated these days.

Anyway, the prologue: Since college, my "girls" and I have been getting together for Christmas at Jill's parents' house to decorate for the holiday and all that. It's a fun tradition, similar enough each year to pull at our heart strings but evolving enough to keep us interested in attending. We exchanged gifts at first, and after two years of failing miserably at that, we switched to buying each other ornaments. I brought a craft for us to do last year, and after that was a success, we switched to each of us bringing in a craft. And that brings us to today's post.

You may not have caught that at first: EACH ONE OF US brought in a craft. That is a lot of crafting.

WE CRAFTED FOR FOUR HOURS.

Keep breast milk out unrefrigerated before it goes bad.
Watch “Gone with the Wind” (3 hrs, 46 min).
Run a marathon.
Draw comics for your blog.
Take an extra long nap.
Work a day at a part-time job.
Watch four episodes of “The Walking Dead.”
Troll Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/Etsy/your web-based procrastination station of choice.
Build a living room’s worth of IKEA furniture.
Not get a healthy amount of sleep. (6+ hours!)
Build a shed.
Digest and absorb a well-rounded meal (3-4 hours).
Read a book.
Go on a hot air balloon ride.
Fly from London to the South of France.
Read Life as LeeAnne Knows It. (Kidding. You’d have to read it about a dozen times to fill four hours!)
Play a game of Risk or Monopoly or some other frustrating board game.
CRAFT.

Don't get me wrong, I love crafting. My Pinterest DIY board makes me extremely happy.

I friggin' love Pinterest.

But crafting can get away from you. Some things are easy to do, some are difficult, but they all take time. Lots and lots of time.

180 Christmas crafts that would have been easier and less time-consuming than the ones we chose.

We started out with a simple, pre-packaged craft: jingle bell ornaments. Or, at least we thought it was simple.

Craft-induced identity crisis.

Needless to say, that didn't bode well for the remaining 3 hours and 56 minutes we spent crafting. Those ended up looking alright, though, if a little like Nicki Minaj.

Difficult as the crafts may have been, we all had fun and Jackie especially attempted each craft with a lot of fervor.

Us applying stray adhesive to our ornaments.

Jackie applying spray adhesive to her ornaments.

Us applying glitter to our ornaments.

Jackie applying glitter to her ornaments.

Unfortunately, enthusiasm doesn't always make things better. Especially after hours of crafting, it's difficult to maintain both enthusiasm and skill.

Even the worst of crafts ended up looking adorable and awesome, though.* That's the glory of crafting, the imperfections really DO add character. (*I want to note that by the end of the night, my crafts were neither adorable nor awesome, but we'll skirt over my short attention span and complete lack of patience.)

Enthusiasm backfired for Jackie in unexpected ways, too.

Turns out the spray adhesive cloud mixed with the glitter explosion gave Jackie a difficult time. :)

So, lessons learned:

Four hours is too long to craft. Unless, of course, it's the holidays, then you'll be expected to craft as long as it's festive.
LeeAnne really has only two good crafts in her, then the other go considerably downhill.
Crafting is messy business, so be careful with the spray adhesive.
There are a LOT of fumes from clouds of spray adhesive.
Those fumes make crafting for so long a little more tolerable.