Year End Wrap Up

Holly Jolly, By Golly!

Our trees were full of handmade Things With Wings ornaments!

We sure hope you had a great Christmas!  Ours was full of lots of family time, lots of good food, lots of new toys, lots of game playing, and lots of special handmade gifts!

The youngest Winger Emily was here from Austin for 2 weeks!  We talked a lot, laughed a lot, ate a lot and relaxed a lot.  For Christmas she gave us our very own copies of the new Austin Stone Live Worship album!  If you haven't heard it yet, go take a listen for yourself - you'll want to buy it!  They have a new website too, with a ton of awesome resources.  One of the best things about the website is that you can watch the hour long album release celebration any time you want to.  That's our Emily over on the left side of the stage with the look of pure joy on her face.  I KNOW she's really going to appreciate that I've captured this screen shot of her :-)

If you're on facebook much, you may have already seen some of the handmade gifts that we gave each other for Christmas.  Green Girl made us framed yarn-wrapped letters.  She painted the frame, added the background, and wrapped paper mache letters:

and painted leather cuff bracelets.  She cut the leather, added snaps, and painted each one in a fun, unique way:

Mamma Winger made us unique artwork from a vintage dictionary and stamped letters printed on canvas.

To wrap up 2011, we thought we'd investigate what our most popular posts from this past year were. These blog entries were our top viewed blog posts and/or top pinned images from Pinterest.

1.  Teacher Gifts, December 20, 2011  This was our top viewed post due to the explosion of new visitors brought our way via Craftgawker!   In this post I shared the inexpensive and easy teacher Christmas gifts I made from a 2x4 plank of wood.  

2.  My New Wall, August 15, 2011  In this post Green Girl Laura shared her entryway welcome wall created from a variety of frames in her collection.  We all LOVE and can relate to its honest message!  And it's so much fun for it to be one of the first things guests see when they enter her home.  The majority of our blog visitors to this post came from Pinterest.   

This welcome message has been very popular and also appears in our top selling "This Thing Called Family" piece!   Guess a lot of people can relate!

3.  New Creative Works by Connie (Mamma Winger),  May 24, 2011  In this post, Connie, aka Mamma Winger, shared a multitude of amazing new pieces that she had ready for our spring art shows, but the image that caught everyone's eye and created the most buzz was her "ABC's of life" - that baby is still ALL OVER Pinterest!

sold

 It was very interesting to investigate our top viewed posts of the year and the referring traffic sources.  By FAR and away, Pinterest has brought us the most traffic this year.  It's made a huge difference in the number of visitors we get.  Thanks, Pinterest!  You can follow our boards here: http://pinterest.com/thingswithwings   Leave your link in the comments if you'd like us to follow you!

So now it's on to 2012... this is a time of looking back at what we've learned from 2011 and a time of looking forward to all the good things sure to come in 2012!  Are you making any resolutions?

We wish you all a safe and happy new year! See ya on the flipside!  :-)