Our Christmas Mantel

Growing up, I never had a fireplace in my house. I live in Texas so, obviously, it wasn’t really a huge deal. It’s not like we have a ton of opportunities to light fires around here! However, every year at Christmas, it was always so disappointing to me not to have a mantel to hang my stockings on. And, of course, I was always very concerned about how Santa would make it into our house if we didn’t have a chimney!

Needless to say, when we moved into our new house last year I was more than a little excited to finally have a fireplace and a mantel. I might be an adult now, but I’m still a kid at heart and there is just something so magical to me about lighting a fire and settling in for the evening. And I absolutely love seeing our stockings hung on the mantel and having one more place that I can decorate for the Christmas season.

I haven’t been very good about switching up our mantel decor from season to season like a lot of people do, but trust me when I say that I couldn’t wait to bust out some Christmas decorations to put on the mantel. It ended up being one of my favorite decorated spots in the house and it makes me smile every single day.

Mmmmmm. LOVE. Let’s start our discussion on the giant canvas, shall we? I’ve been planning on making that for weeks now but it wasn’t until this weekend that I finally got the courage to actually do it – and I’m SO glad I did! It make a huge statement in the room and I’m always a fan of changing up as much as possible for the Christmas season (I said it last year and I’ll say it again – I’m a firm believe that more is MORE when it comes to Christmas decorating)!

I had been wanting to do something special to hang above our mantel for a while, and I knew I wanted something sparkly and glittery, but beyond that I wasn’t sure where to start. I considered doing lyrics from a Christmas carol, but one day when Corey and I were in HomeGoods we saw this sign and fell in love with the quote:

Corey immediately said that he’d like that to be what we hung above our mantel, and I agreed – it was the perfect sentiment. So, we bought a big canvas from Hobby Lobby (they were buy one get one free, too – so once I gather my courage again I’ll have another canvas project to share!) and got to work. We played around with a few different letter sizes in Word before we landed on the perfect size, and then I printed them out and cut out all of the letters.

Once I had them cut out, I laid them out on the canvas to make sure it would work – thankfully, they fit perfectly. So my next step was to tape off some straight lines and get to tracing!

I just used a pencil to trace all of the letters onto the canvas, then the fun part started. I used Tacky Glue to fill in each letter completely (I did 2-3 letters at a time)…

Then I shook some glitter on it…

And then every few words, I picked up the canvas and shook the excess off!

It took forever, and it hurt my hand like crazy to squeeze the stupid glue bottle for that long, but in the end it was totally worth it. I did all of the gold first, then I went back and did the red.

We let it dry overnight, then we brought it out to the workshop to seal it. We just used some Valspar High-Gloss Spray Lacquer because we already had some lying around – just a couple of quick coats on top to make sure that we don’t get a ton of shedding glitter, then it was ready to hang!

I’m so happy with how it turned out and I think it looks fantastic! We also have some cute faux-mercury glass candlesticks from Kohl’s last year and a tiny little battery-powered Christmas tree from HomeGoods. And, of course, stockings for the whole family!

Do you decorate your mantel for the seasons? Anyone else grow up without a fireplace and feel totally deprived?