Some ribbon, rocks, branches, paper and a jar. Sounds easy enough to stick them all together, right?  Wrong. I had to find the perfect branches, the perfectly colored rocks, the perfect jar and put them all together to make them look “artsy.”

To start off my mini DIY (do it yourself) decorating adventure, I searched for some DIY Thanksgiving projects ideas on Pinterest. There, I came up with a wide variety of crafts, ranging from turkey hands for second graders to DIY pumpkin spice soap for more mature audiences.

As I love decorating and had been looking for a way to brighten up my room with warm fall colors, I was excited to start. I hadn’t done a DIY project since elementary school; normally I buy all my decorations. Naturally, I picked a project I thought was fairly simple and could be made from materials I had on hand.

I ended up doing a “thankful tree.” It’s a glass jar filled with rocks that hold up branches, decorated with ribbon. The branches hold small blackboard pieces with words to express gratitude, such as family, friends, shelter and of course, food.

I began the trek to find the perfect materials for my project. The difficulties started right away, as I searched for branches, a seemingly simple task. Branches are like snowflakes — each one is different. For some people, that might sound fascinating, but I soon realized that wandering around in the dark outside searching for the perfect branches in my backyard to use was a drag. Why couldn’t all branches look as perfect as the ones in the Pinterest picture did?

After half an hour of being poked by straggly branches and sawing my way through unruly trees, I decided to stop searching and instead trim the branches into the shapes that I wanted.

Then came the moment of truth — how would my painstakingly chosen branches look inside a glass jar full of rocks?

Well, let’s just say it was hard, and I came close to smashing the jar onto the floor. Multiple times. Most of the time, my branches flopped out of the jar and refused to stick between the rocks that were supposed to hold them up. On the rare occasion that they did stick, I accidentally pushed it out in my efforts to get another branch in.

Some may call me OCD, but I just think it’s important to have things done right.  

I’d like to think that I did the photos on Pinterest justice. But then again, others may say my thankful tree looked more like a scraggly, dying pile of branches inside a fat, glass jar with depressing colored rocks.