4th of July Mantel

We had a super fun 4th of July.  It started with a parade that our neighborhood has every year.  We were reminiscing about how when Big Bear was a baby we'd go to that parade and it would be about 10 minutes long - a few cars, some drill teamer's and cheerleaders and that's about it.  This year it was close to an hour!  So many cars and floats - tons of candy and lots of fun.  Kind of neat to watch it grow each year.  After the parade, we came home so that I could run some errands to get Big Bear ready for camp.  I wanted to take advantage of having my hubby home on a weekday and even more advantage of the stores being open on a holiday which turned out to mean that there were hardly any other people there!  I got a lot done.  But I didn't want the whole day to be about work so after lunch we headed to my parent's house and spent the rest of the afternoon in the pool.  After grilling out, we all took showers, vegged out for a little while and then headed out for fireworks.  It was a LONG day but SO FUN!!  Hope yours was great too!

I did a lot of 4th of July crafting.  I'm not usually that big into 4th of July decorating.  It usually sneaks up on me and then I don't really want to bother with decorating for just a few days.  Well, it snuck up on me again this year, but I did bother!!  I already showed you my entry hall decorations in this post.  But I did even more!!

It really has to do with the fact that I'm keeping a little girl two days a week for a few weeks this summer.  I've had to get a little creative in order to keep all 4 kids occupied.  She really likes to do crafts so I've been trying to plan crafts for us to do and that led to a few of the fun things I ended up using for decorations.  Of course, these come from ...where else, Pinterest!!  Check out my 4th of July board to see where I got the inspirations for all of these cute crafts plus the wreath I made!!

So these are the first ones we made.  Little paper lanterns.  The Pinterest version were WAY cuter but we had a lot of fun making these. It was a last minute idea that ended up looking really cute on the mantel.

Next we made these cute little lanterns.  We took empty jars and mod podged tissue and crepe paper on the inside of them.  The kids were all working on this craft and I got jealous because there wasn't another jar for me.  I went searching around to see what I could find and ran across this wine bottle I had started to spray paint forever ago for another craft I didn't finish and I made one too!!

 I had a wooden picture frame so I painted it blue with red dots.

 

Then I took a canvass and painted it red.  I cut a star out of paper on my Cameo and used it for a stencil. I used glitter paint but then also poured some glitter on top. I think it turned out so fun!

All in all, the mantel turned out so cute!!  When the sun started to go down we turned on little flame less candles that you get at the dollar store that I had put down in the lanterns.  It looked so pretty!

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