Pine Cone Picture Holder

Well due to the impending new year I figured I'd better get this last post out because after the holiday it would just be weird. As you may recall, I wrote about my foyer table holiday vignette here.  It was soon thereafter when I began to receive photo Christmas cards in the mail that I realized that my lovely smelling pine cones could serve double duty!! I know!!! I was shocked too!!

I really love the photo cards that I get but seriously...how do you showcase them? They don't stand on their own like regular cards, and as you know I don't like clutter on my fridge. I know that I have my newly created magnetic chalkboard but I still need to get magnets! So you can imagine how pleased I was when I realized that my pine cone decor served as the perfect little photo holder!! Feast your eyes on this!

How bout that! Here are a couple other angles for you:

 

So there you have it, holiday ingenuity at it's finest.  Happy New Year to all of you out there in blog land! I wish you all a wonderful 2011!!

Tatum

Simple Holiday Vignette

Beautifully scented pine cones, a vase, platter and leftover golden ornaments made for this simple foyer table vignette.

Note the wonderful 5 book!

I love how such simple decor can make a big difference. Especially inexpensive decor! Even better.

Tatum

Holiday Centerpiece

Though our Christmas tree was up it was imperative that we had some additional elements to make the inside a bit more festive. Naturally being a person that isn't big on spending, I looked around to see what I could work with in my home. Here is what I found!

Christmas ornaments that I purchased a couple years ago on sale from Bed Bath and Beyond, and this!

It's a cone! I purchased two cones in 2008 to make Christmas decorations. With one cone my dad, nephew Camden (who was 3 at the time) and I made this:

It's a peppermint tree! It was a fun way to spend quality time on the holiday. The other cone went unused until now. So the ornaments, cone and this nifty little sewing kit:

along with a bit of ingenuity, created this lovely semi creepy headless Santa tree thing!

Tada! instant centerpiece! (I'm sure you would have thought it was much cuter if I didn't call it a creepy headless Santa thing) But isn't it great? What's better is that I ran out of ornaments...see below...

and had to figure out what to put on top. Enter Santa gift card holder from a year ago...I love clever ideas!

Ahh the joys of the holidays.

Tatum

I'm linking to Frugal Friday at The Shabby Nest! and Show And Tell Friday at My Romantic Home  and We Did It Wednesdays at Sew Much Ado

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas 3

Here it is! Our Christmas Tree:

What do you think? We opted for very simple in order to prevent it from looking cluttered. We like it! Have you noticed that it doesn't have a tree topper? Yea, we're not too sure about those yet. We didn't find anything that we liked particularly so as of now we're opting out. I also think that if you don't chose right you risk it looking corny.

Here it is in the dark:

Stay tuned to see a couple additional decorative items to round out our holiday house.


Tatum

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas 2

So after we purchased the tree we opened the box:

Read the instructions:

And soon discovered that there is a pretty nifty system to this artificial tree thing...Color Codes!

how about that!

So we separated all the colors:

 And got to work!

And play!

So what do you think? he he he!

Chris, you're the new Vanna White!

And of course I can't be too serious for too long:

And Tada!!!

Isn't it lovely...in an artificial, pointy, shaped like an A kind of way? We'll have to gussy it up a bit to make it pop.

Stay tuned! Man, I'm rather long-winded on this one. It should not take this long to document putting up a fake tree lol.  O'well.

Tatum

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

Finally!! We are able to have a Christmas tree in our semi-complete house!!! And did you know that this is the first Christmas that Chris and I will be spending together? I KNOW!!! Can you believe it? After 14 years we have never spent a Christmas together. We were so used to traveling home to be with our individual families. Last year, we spent Christmas Eve together wrapping gifts, eating crab legs and steak and watching Pixar's UP...we had a fabulous time and then went our separate ways. However, this year is our year and we even bought a cute little 2010 charm to commemorate it. First things first...purchase a tree! We thought about going out to a tree farm and picking out a tree or cutting our own down but something about that whole process just didn't really appeal to us. Not to mention the fact that I'm allergic to all trees, the needles stabbing us and being scattered about, having to water it everyday etc. So we decided to buy a fake one and went to purchase this!

A 7.5 Ft Donner Fir...yep means nothing to me either. It's like some sort of Santa reindeer tree I guess. Either way it's ours. We first thought we'd be a bit ambitious on the ornament color choices and get greens, browns and silvers. However, once we were out we completely doubted ourselves and chose something a bit more traditional, red and gold. Now, we have decorated trees every Christmas all our lives, but since we are finally doing our own tree we're a bit like novices. Needless to say, it made for an amusing evening out, but we were quite happy with our ornaments in the end.

 

 

And add in a few hundred lights and we're gonna have a beautiful Christmas tree on our hands...so we hope

 

We did buy the wrong lights a couple times!! We meant to buy two sets of clear lights, but we first bought one clear and one multiple colored. We then returned the multiple color lights for a set of clear lights only to get home and realize that we had clear lights with white wires!! A green tree will look horrible with white wires. It's not that I have anything against white...some of my best friends are white! Lol, O.k seriously, either we are space cases that pay no attention, or the Christmas light companies have too many options! I think it's the latter. I mean, don't they know that there are eager couples spending their first Christmas together and way too excited to realize that there are so many light options?

Well, now that you are sucked into our Christmas, stay tuned to see how we survive the tree trimming! Or, tree shaping, or whatever you do to artificial trees :-)

Tatum

Give Thanks!

With fall among us and Thanksgiving just 2 days away I thought I'd post a few photos of how I made our home feel a bit festive in the midst of some of the craziness of unfinished projects. A few weeks ago Chris and I went to the store and purchased some very inexpensive items that were orange, red, brown, yellow and green!

 

Those two boxes of fun that only costs $6.00 each, along with these leafy wonders that cost $1.50 each:

 

Gave me quite a bit to work with. So after grabbing these:

 

In order to do this over and over again to cut the wires:

 

 I was finally able to run around my house and find some vases in order to create these beauties:

 

And each had it's own special location. The large one in the center went on the kitchen island, the skinny vase to the left went on the television stand, the vase to the right  went in the center of the dining room table:

 

And the platter went onto the foyer table:

And the remaining leaves were put into my wicker floor vase where they fit snuggly with the other leafy things that I had:

I even added the brown ribbon from the vase filler boxes!

And to add in a little more ambiance, I burned some yummy pumpkin candles in my lovely sconces!

 

So there you have it. My attempt at bringing the Thanksgiving holiday to life in our home. You can do it too!!! Hope you enjoyed it!

Tatum

By the way, I'm linking to the Thanksgiving Party over at All Thingz Related!

Pumpkins Pumpkins Pumpkins

Though I'm not a huge fan of Fall (mainly due to the looming winter depression) there are some things that I do like, like the colors.

 

New yummy Starbucks drinks such as the Pumpkin Spice Latte, or Salted Caramel Mocha

And of course new cute sweaters and bouncy scarves!

But what I find to be really intriguing are pumpkins! There are so many ways to make pumpkins fun. Take a look at some of the images I found on the world wide web!

Pumpkin People

Scary Pumpkin Eating Pumpkin Monsters

Fancy Black and White Pumpkins

Creepy Carved Pumpkins

Funny Pumpkins...he he he. Ok, or maybe not so funny?

Molded Pumpkins

Baby Pumpkins

And for the most amazing pumpkin you'll ever see!!!!!

Yep! Lol, I made this beauty for Thanksgiving 2009. Another one of my many fun holiday attempts that gave my family another laugh...mixed with fear lol! Just like these fun adventures! Oh how fun to make, and funny!! I'll show you photos one day!

Happy Fall everyone!

Tatum

Oh! and I'm linking to Vanessa at Southern In My Heart!! Check her out!