Mortaine’s Blog

I am on a total sugar binge today, I swear! All week, actually. Right now, I’m sucking on a hard candy I snagged from the candy bowl on the way out of the house. At lunch (Sushi!), I had a custard roll thingie (the sushi place makes desserts that are presented on sushi plates and are easily picked up with chopsticks).

Mmmmmm….. sugar….

I’m making a custom style for my sister for her birthday. Would everyone who reads my journal and has a custom style or layout or overrides please post here about it, and make a mention of whether it’s a custom style or uses overrides or both, please? I’d like her to see other peoples’ styles so she can tell me if there’s something she likes.

Jen, you can also surf the random link (http://www.livejournal.com/random.bml) or use the directory (http://www.livejournal.com/directorysearch.bml) to search for people by interest or location or whatever and look at various styles on LiveJournal. is a community for custom styles– you can look there, as people will often post when they change their custom styles and get critiques and so forth.

Make sure you bookmark or write down the usernames for any styles you really like, and then post them here or email them to me so I can steal creatively copy them.

My full-size holiday tree is posted online now.

Note the blue and white coordinated lights and ornaments. Be impressed, please– if you knew what the holiday tree looked like when I was growing up, you would be very impressed that I somehow managed to get even that much color coordination together. Believe me, every year I have to actively resist putting up all the special non-matching ornaments.

Oh, and all the lights are clipped on to their branches. Yep, you can shake that tree until the ornaments fly off and shatter ornament glass into your eyes, but those lights will stay on.

Please also note the beautifully hand-wrapped gifts under the tree. A little bit of inexpensive tissue paper (purchased last year at 50% off), some leftover glittery tulle from a long-past craft project, some ribbon, some green-and-gold yarn, some white yarn, and some holiday “picks” from last year (75% off last year). All gift tags are hand-calligraphied by me, as they are every year. The gifts are tucked under the tree a bit– that’s because there are stuffed animals and Hammer seems to believe that all stuffies in the house are his.

Oooooohh

What you can’t see here is that there are little blinking lights on the tree.

I glued down the presents under the tree (hiding the seam while I was at it, tee hee!) and did not glue the garland as recommended. For one thing, I couldn’t get it to drape right on my first clumsy try, and for another, I don’t want to mess around with the hot glue gun at work too much– after all, one never knows when the fire alarm might decide to go off.

I am currently keeping this little masterpiece on my desk between my sister’s picture and my wedding photo. I might move it to a more prominent spot, like staple-gunned to the front of my cubicle if I feel especially jaded.

One thing I must say about the expensive tree– all of the branches are green-beaded wires, so it really does look quite nice. Putting it together took me about 2.5 hours, mostly during lunch, and though it doesn’t have many ornaments on it, I can always make more ornaments and don’t need to purchase the expensive brand-name ones. However, as stocking stuffers, more ornaments are kind of cool– I think they’re less than a half inch in size, if you’re looking for a sense of scale.