New Mantle!

So, as promised, I am posting about my fabulous new mantle that Papa made me! It came about as me complaining to Nana that I had a fireplace, but no mantle. She in turn, reported the conversation to Papa, and -genius that he is- figured he could make me one out of some scrap materials he had just laying around. So- here's the BEFORE shot, which you may recall from last week:

And AFTER!!!

Isn't it awesome!! And the price tag on this baby is a whopping ZERO! Papa made the entire thing- plus the two candle holders, completely out of scraps! He is awesome!

And for the decor: Nana gave me some old garland she had laying around and I threw in some pine cones that I had left over. Then I hit up an amazing sale at Kohl's over the weekend and for less than $15 got the two picture frames and 4 little place-card holders! Kohl's rocks my world!

I  found some $1 ribbon at Big Lots and tied it around the candles so it could match my ornaments.

I also made the NOEL letters w/ paper plates and leftover fabric from the ornaments I covered. It went a litte like this:
I made these letter out of card stock and construction paper and they just didn't do it for me (and you can probably see why).

So then I decided to break out the tacky glue! I free-handed the original letters and then used them as a template on the paper plates.

I then smothered the paper plates in tacky glue and placed the material on top. I let them dry over night and then did a rough cut around the letter and Voila! I think it turned out really cute!

I was inspired by a homemade sign we used to put up in our front porch windows when I was a little kid that said NOEL in red letters. Too bad I do not have any old pictures of that to show. :) But for you viewing pleasure- I did torture the pups and made them sit through a mini-Christmas photo shoot: