Christmas in my New Home

The Christmas season is in full swing, and I thought I'd give you all a peek into my home this Christmas - perfect timing, since we just recently acquired living room furniture courtesy of my very generous in-laws! I certainly wasn't going to show my living room with all of our movies and decorations in boxes ;)

My mantle makes me so happy. I love my animal portraits. I love my CB2 candlesticks. I love the colorful mess of melted candles in the fireplace.

Our stockings have thus far been for decoration only. One reason is that the stocking holders we have are rendered completely ineffective once anything is actually placed inside the stockings - they just fall right off of the mantle. The other reason is simple neglect. We need to get the stocking tradition started in our house!!

Here is our tree. (Kindly ignore our Guitar Hero drum set.) ;) People seem to be all about the white lights, but I love colored. They're just so cheerful and nostalgic for me. I've always loved lots of color, and I think it's the perfect way to celebrate. Credit goes to Buddy the Elf for the paper garland and snowflakes. He was my inspiration.

Our new entertainment center. We drove to IKEA in Atlanta and back the Sunday after Thanksgiving to get it. We even assembled it when we got back. It was a rather fun adventure :o) The vintage Christmas tree and bell decorations (on either side of the TV) are courtesy of my BFF, Josey. She's known for finding awesome things at thrift stores and antique malls and sending them to me out of the blue. I pretty much couldn't ask for more awesomeness in our friendship (just a little more geographical proximity).

I love my adorable felt trees from CB2 - not only are they a delight to look at, but they remind me of our wonderful trip to New York City last Thanksgiving, where I purchased them.

I made this wall art - no, it is not crooked on my wall; I just framed the photo crookedly ;)

Our new couch. I LOVE IT. The throw pillows make it, I think. The colors look so great at Christmastime and will look awesome all throughout the year. Love love love.

Someone decided he had to get into the picture and be all cute.

This is my sweet little hutch in the kitchen - all decorated for Christmas!

The gnome potholders came from Etsy. I love them so.

I picked up my mischievous Elf on the Shelf and some cute tins from a local antique store. I LOVE old Christmas decorations and knickknacks. It's so fun to be reminded that people have been getting excited about Christmas for years and years and years.

And there you have it! :o)

He's so Fluffy I'm Gonna DIE!!!

It was early this morning, about halfway through my cup of coffee. Ryan had just left for work and I was wondering what to blog about today when it happened.

The door opened and Ryan said, "Hey, Sarah, wanna see the fuzziest caterpillar ever?"

"YES!" I sprang up and starting running toward the door. "Oh wait - camera!"

When my pajama-clad self walked out the door, this is what I saw.

Eeeek! Isn't he cute? (I don't know why, but all creatures in nature are male to me. I wonder what Freud would have to say about that?)

Not only is he attractive to the eye, but he also has an appreciation for the arts. Here he is crawling all over the neighbor kids' sidewalk chalk drawing to get a closer look.

"Come to me, and together we will play and laugh and daydream and I really hope you aren't poisonous and won't bite me even though 'death by caterpillar' would be pretty amusing on the death certificate."

He didn't bite.

Bye-bye, caterpillar friend. I sincerely hope I don't walk outside and find you squashed at my doorstep later today. I would cry.

I'm going to tell myself that you will find a pretty lady caterpillar who looks just like you, only pink and purple, and together you will browse museums and frequent local coffee shops on beat poetry night.

Taking Matters Into my Own Hands

A few weeks ago, on one of my favorite blogs, I saw the most adorable shabby, obviously handmade fabric flowers. I asked the author for a tutorial but with four kids and her many creative escapades to keep her busy, she has rather understandably not provided one (so far).

I googled. I surveyed. Finally, I decided that they really couldn't be that difficult to make, so into my crafting room I went.

Materials:

She's not necessary, but she does provide pleasant company.

Not pictured: fabric (duh), felt, button, needle and thread.

Tip: I may regret giving away my secret, especially if you live in Nashville, but my favorite place to buy fabric is in the form of old pillowcases at Goodwill (sheets if I need more than scraps). There are all kinds of solid colors as well as, most of the time, a few lovely vintage prints. And they're CHEAP. So much easier and less expensive (and overwhelming) than going to Joann or Hobby Lobby - which, for me, is thirty minutes away.

The first thing I did was cut strips of the fabric I wanted to use for my flower. I'm sorry, but I did not measure my strips. If you have fabric to spare, my advice would be to start long (18" or so) and trim off what you don't need at the end. The bottom flower will be the longest and widest, and each layer on top of that will decrease in length and width (again, I eyeballed and trimmed as needed).

Fold the strip of fabric in half length-wise and press.

Now. I could have used my sewing machine for this, but after oh-so-carefully folding pleats, struggling to pin each one down perfectly, and seeing how much time it was taking, I scrapped that idea and grabbed my trusty hot glue gun.

On an "appropriate" surface (one you don't mind picking strings of glue off of), put your strip of fabric down and fold a pleat. Mark the area where the fabric overlaps and put a dab of hot glue there. Less is more, as the mean dude in "Angels in the Outfield" used to say.

Press the pleat on top of the glue and hold for a few seconds to let dry.

(I apologize for the quality of these pictures - it is most difficult to craft with one hand and photograph with the other. A 1.4 aperture is usually a beautiful thing, but not when there's so much going on in the photo and so little of it is in focus. I'm much more apt at photographing when I don't have a hot glue gun in my hands.)

Continue folding and gluing. The "tighter" you want your flower to be, the narrower the pleats need to be on top where you're gluing. The pleats should never be the same width on top and bottom because then you'll just end up with a straight line of pleats instead of a circle. I hope that makes sense...

When you've folded and glued all the way around, trim off the extra fabric and glue the ends together, overlapping some. Cut out a circle of felt, put a ring of hot glue on it, and glue it to the flower.

Repeat this process with more flower layers as desired.

Now, when you're finished, you'll have a gaping hole in the middle of your flowers. This is when a cute tidbit such as a button comes into play. Thread a needle and bring the needle up through the felt and through the button holes. Repeat three to four times to make sure the button is nice and secure. Then tie the threads on the bottom into a double- or triple-knot and trim off the excess thread.

Voila!!! She's cute, huh?

You can make your flowers into pins by simply hot-gluing the felt base of the flowers to a pin base, found at Michael's, Hobby Lobby, etc (maybe even Wal-Mart, but I avoid that place like the plague so I wouldn't know). ;)

I chose to make my flower into a headband. I measured around my head with elastic and cut it to the appropriate length. Then I cut another felt circle (yeah, by this time I'd given up with the camera) and hot glued the elastic onto it. I hot-glued THAT onto the felt base of the flower.

This is the best picture I was able to get of myself. (Ryan, come home!)

I must say that I was pleased with the way it turned out :o) So I didn't stop there. I made another headband (and resorted to Photobooth with its yucky, unflattering use of unnecessary flash but extreme convenience).

I tried to wear it the way all the cool kids are wearing headbands nowadays, but I don't think the results were very awesome. I think my bangs make it look awkward.

For the "middle" of this flower, I simply took a tiny piece of the yellow fabric, folded it over a couple of times to make it look nice, and hot glued the sucker on there. I hot glue everything. Hot glue, hot glue, hot glue. I should probably just start eating it so that I can eventually shoot it out of my wrists a la Spidey. That sounds like a super-convenient and not at all messy idea!

Elly is HERE!

A few weeks ago, I posted Colleen's maternity photos. While shooting that session, I kept thinking, "What if she goes into labor right now?!" Well, baby E's due date in late August came and went, and she was finally born, appropriately, on Labor Day weekend. Elianna Joy is here at last, and I had the privilege of going to visit her and snap some pictures of her now that she's home!

Never would I have expected a baby so new to this world to be SO alert and expressive. I expected her to be sleepy for all of the photos, which would have been adorable anyway, but she surprised us all with wide eyes!

Mother and daughter. Two beautiful ladies indeed.

Phil is the definition of "Proud Papa."

Now they are a family!

Cannot get over this precious girl.

Phil and Colleen, thank you so much for giving me the honor of taking sweet Elly's pics. I'm so excited to watch her grow and learn - she's already off to a great start!

This is Why the Internet is Dangerous ;)

I'm taking a break from cleaning (okay, so I've been doing a lot more "breaking" than cleaning so far today) to browse stuff that I can't have. Healthy, huh? But I do think it's fun to be creative, if only in my head, and window-shop. (I couldn't use the "Windows-shop" pun that came into my head because I'm now a Mac - and proud.) I will eventually need to furnish and decorate my apartment, anyway, so I can always get a head start on ideas.

I want to cut this in half and make curtains. My living room window is huge and looks out on NOTHING but a sea of trees. How perfect would that look in my treehouse?

This would look so great in my living room - maybe sitting on a side table or on one of the shelves of the entertainment center we're dreaming of getting (right now our TV is on our coffee table). It'd also encourage me to wander into the wilderness to pick flowers. All I need is a red hooded cape.

I can't get over how wonderful this is. As I become more of a seamstress and acquire little tools that need to be organized, I'm seeing more and more of a need for a little box or chest like this. The small size is so great for placing it on my sewing table, IT COMES WITH THREAD!!!, and look at that raw wood - just begging me to customize it. And the price is great!

Uh, awesome. The light fixture above our dining table is so outdated - it's there, making this unnecessary, but a girl can dream. And it's so fun to look at.

I can't tell you how great this would look on a certain small portion of our living room wall. The walls are painted a light grey. This would just pop. I can see it now.

Okay, enough for now. The reality that is the Swiffer WetJet is calling. Eventually (read: when I figure out how), I hope to have a separate page for fun, inspiring things I find. For now, I hope you had fun imagining with me! :o)

Makeover COMPLETE (for now, anyway)!

Well, friends, how do you like it? My blog's new look makes me smile. I need to "shout it out" (teehee...most of you won't get that, but that's okay) to my awesome husband who was able to use his coding knowledge to fix things, move things, change things, and customize things for me - and also to www.shabbyblogs.com for being awesome. Everything on that site makes me want to drool. If it were up to me, I'd use a different layout of theirs every day and the sides of my blog would be lined with the buttons and blinkies, but that would obviously be overkill.

I'll continue to make some changes, like adding pages, throughout the next few days. I definitely plan to get back into blogging full-swing now. Let's hope that works out!

Thanks for visiting!

My Kitschy Kitchen

I have been itching to post pictures of my apartment, but too much of it is still in progress. However, one area is (mostly) finished: the kitchen!

Come on in...

I decided to take advantage of the presence of a chair rail and paint two different colors. I knew I wanted pale blue in my kitchen even before we moved, and I decided on pale yellow for the bottom. I got the baker's rack on craigslist. Yay! It was a great find and perfect for storing my dear keepsakes.

This is my flowery elephant. It fell and its trunk broke into a bunch of little pieces, but I rescued it with superglue. In the background you can see the awesome tile my friend Josey found for me and the matryoshka measuring cups I cherish so much!

My friend Kristena custom-made this adorable coffee grinder cozy for me. I am so proud of it! She never ceases to amaze me.

I found this vintage wall hanging while antiquing in a nearby town. I love it! How appropriate in my kitty-cat-filled home :)

This is another Josey find. She has luck at Goodwill the likes of which I've never seen.

She also found me these great embroideries!

I still need to make a little valance to go over the window, and I realize I failed to get a full shot of the kitchen - I couldn't get a great angle so I'll wait until I feel like finding a wider lens to do that ;)

Hope you enjoyed the peek into my sweet little kitchen!