{Things I've done so far...part 3}

Summer Mantle--

In this post I showed you pictures of my spring mantle. I have this very long and not very deep mantle. It has been SO hard for me to make it look "decorated" except at Christmas---I have lived in this house for 11 years and I never have been happy with how it's been decorated. SO, I decided to decorate it seasonally and I am finally satisfied! Now, be warned---it's a bit gaudy! ;D But it's MY mantle, not yours, so no worries. I made a summer banner, too. I hope to finish my fall and Christmas banners this summer so they will be ready to go. The banner is what takes me so long to make!

Here are most of the letters in my banner. It says "Welcome Summer"---I am usually excited for summer to get here, but THIS year I was just plain grateful for summer to finally come. I needed some time to slow down and regroup---thus the "Welcome Summer". I used the Papertrey Banner Builders dies and a bunch of random paper I had. I had such fun making this~

I put up pictures of the kids at the beach in frames that I found on clearance at Target. I'm not usually a blue person---decorating in blue I mean---but there was a lot of blue this year and I had already purchased the red, white and blue buckets from the dollar spot--so I picked up a couple blue frames and then added other blue I had around the house.

One of the things I have done is kept lights out on the mantle every season---my den is pretty dark, so this helps to brighten things up a bit. I bought those little grapevine ball lights that you use on your patio umbrellas and used them on my mantle this year. This would look even better if I had lit all of my candles---I'm a little crazy when it comes to candles....I like them........a lot. (Don't tell my 9th grade English teacher that I used that---she hated it when we used "a lot"--or "alot" as we usually wrote it....but I digress.) Now you understand why my blog is titled "nelson ramblings"....I tend to do this.

I'm done---! Mantle is done---I'm starting my next project today.....crossing fingers that it works like it looks in my mind.....we'll see!