Sister's Choice Quilts

A Touch of Red

I have switched up my tiered tray again, this time with some touches of red for Valentine's Day.  I really do have a lot of fun with this tray for seasonal and holiday decor on my kitchen counter area.  It's ironic that most of these little items I already had.  No need to break the bank shopping for new doodads each time I want to change it out.  However, I have to say, when I go into Target, Michael's or Joann, my eyes are peeled for anything inexpensive that would be cute on it.  What I did buy recently was the little wooden heart-shaped sign that says "Home is Where the Heart Is" ($4, with discount at Michael's) and the Rae Dunn "Hugs" mug ($6 at Home Goods).

Speaking of Rae Dunn, are you familiar with the craze surrounding the pottery pieces designed by the artist?  It is nuts.  The simple pieces are distinctive because of the font used to engrave words onto the items.  At Halloween you could find mugs with "Boo" or "Wicked" on them.  At Christmas maybe "Jolly" or "Hum Bug" etc.  Each season and holiday there are new ones.  Cute but not that amazing.  Nevertheless, people line up outside TJMaxx and Home Goods (where her stuff is sold) before the stores open on the delivery days, and charge in and fill shopping carts with every piece they can get their hands on, take it home and sell it on eBay for twice as much as they paid.  It is crazy.  When I was at Home Goods, there was a woman there with two little kids whom she had trained to recognize Rae Dunn pieces who were running around like lunatics grabbing every piece they could hold and bringing it over to their mom's shopping cart.  Wow, some message to teach your children.  I had picked up the little "Hugs" mug and was half expecting the woman or one of her little kids to snatch it out of my hands.  You would think the stores would limit the number of pieces each customer could purchase to avoid this hoarding mentality.  What do you think?  Were you aware of this insanity?

Here's the backside of the tray.  Eva sits at the counter by it every day, so her side has to be cute too!

Hope your week is off to a grand start.  

Around the House

You know I love my seasonal decor, but when January arrives, I want to clear the decks and have things as uncluttered as possible. In my dining room, I am keeping it simple with mostly white accents.  My dear husband came home from the grocery store with a spectacular bouquet of yellow roses, and they add just the right pop of color.

The mantel is totally cleared off, and my husband complains that it looks like we are moving.  lol  It's ok.  I am enjoying the simplicity of it.

In the foyer, my hall table is pretty sparse as well, with just a white candle and my primitive star.  I am enjoying the calm look of the blue and white table quilt.

This little Township quilt is on my coffee table with a vanilla scented candle my friend gave me for Christmas.  Have any of you had the Harry Slatkin Homeworx candles from QVC? Oh my gosh, they are divine.  

I am continuing the blue and white vibe in the library, where my Aurora star quilt is waiting to have its binding stitched down.  When I sit in my chair to sew it I can listen to my latest audio book "The Stationary Shop" by Marjan Kamali.

Lastly, here is my little tiered tray all changed out from Christmas to "Winter".  Below is a close up of the top tier.  I think I am going to enjoy decorating this little thing all year long.

How about you?  Have you got your holiday decorations put away?  Do you like to change our your decor seasonally? Do you use quilts in your decorating?

It Is All Catching Up With Me...

Christmas will be here in one week.  I still have some gifts to wrap, last-minute things to pick up, a school performance to attend, cookies to bake, menus to plan and shop for, my son arriving from Ireland today, a guest room to get ready, and I have Eva overnight because her parents are entertaining their employees.  And I am pretty sure I forgot a few things, like my manicure appointment and my date to walk with friends on Friday.

And three more of these to make:

These little triangle pouches are such fun to make, can be finished in a jiffy and people seem to love them for carrying lip balm, hand sanitizer, or even earbuds for audio devices. I attach lobster hooks on little tabs so folks can clip them to whatever.  I have given two away as teacher gifts, so they aren't in the photo, for a total of nine made so far.  I need to make three more, by my calculations and think I can just about manage that.  It is a nice little "extra" gift to tuck in a bag.  Especially if you put something fun inside it.  It is bad luck to give a zippy bag without something in it, don't you know?  If anyone is interested in a tutorial, I took lots of photos while I was constructing them, so I could do that.

Eva and I made an astonishing mess making spritz cookies for her to give her parents and grandparents in the little tins above. I found them at Savemart and think they will be perfect.  They are small, so they won't hold a ton of cookies, which is good.  The little spritz cookies will be perfect.  The lids are see-through, which is kind of fun. It is amazing how we totaled the kitchen much fun we had making those things.  I will be sweeping up sprinkles for the next six months, but it was worth it.

Oh!  And I totally forgot to share with you this adorable little wool kit I bought from Shabby Fabrics!  It arrived yesterday and I cannot wait to start it in the New Year.  The pattern is easy (beginner-friendly)  and adorable, and the wool included is so pretty.  It may have just slipped into my shopping cart while I was shopping for other people.

Are you relaxing right now and enjoying the days up to the holidays, or are you totally overcommitted and frazzled?  There must be a balance we could strive for.  I'll get the essentials done in the next two days, and then I swear, I am going to chill out and enjoy my son's visit.

Holiday Gatherings

Hope you all had a great weekend!  I got a little sewing done, and finished my piece for the snowman applique.  The snowman and his broom will go on the right in the empty space.  It will be just the right amount of wool applique to get me started.  Of course I don't have any wool yet, but the Etsy shop where I bought some has shipped it, so yippee.

We had a family gathering on Sunday night, and I was so pleased with all our decorations.  We were all decked out.

My husband, as I have said, loves holiday decorations and thinks the more we have out the better.  He recently came home from a trip down to the Monterey area with a metal tree centerpiece decoration that has holders for five candles.  I wanted to give it a bit more oomph, so I added my crazy snowmen collection around it, and I like the results.  Everyone gives me a hard time about these snowmen, but they are wonderful collectibles that I acquired in the 90's.  

I get a lot of teasing about these funny looking little guys, but they are near and dear to my heart.

I've been watching some YouTube videos on making little zippered bags, so I may attempt one this week if time allows. There is always time to make a few zippered bags before Christmas right?  We have what, nine days? Have you seen the ones that are in the shape of little triangles?  So cute.

Around the House at Christmas

I've been enjoying my little Christmas vignettes around the house.  It is so nice this year to have all the decorations in place, the gifts purchased and wrapped, and my husband at home to enjoy it all with me.  My husband's contract employment has come to an end for now, and just in time for him to be home on a daily basis to take part in the festivities with us. I think I have mentioned that he is Mr. Christmas, and loves every bit of the decorating, cooking, shopping and hoopla that goes with celebrating the holiday.  He is in his element and it is so nice to see how relaxed he is and how often I see a smile on his face.  He has not suggested that we wear matching Christmas pajamas yet, but we do have two more weeks.

I have come up with two more Christmas themed books to share with you all.  I bought both last year but did not get around to finishing them.

In "Seven Days of Us" by Francesca Hornak, the entire Birch family is under one roof at their crumbling country estate for Christmas.  Unexpectedly one of them is exposed to an illness, and they find themselves under quarantine for a week.  And sometimes a week can be a very long time when spent with your family...It will be a different sort of Christmas for sure.

"A Lot Like Christmas" by Connie Willis, is a collection of twelve short stories all with a Christmas theme.  Connie Willis is known for her quirky sense of humor and her way of describing characters with real human foibles.  The topics in the stories include the timeworn Christmas newsletter, Christmas pageants, holiday movies, and office parties.  This time of year when we are all so busy, a short story collection can be just the ticket to getting some reading in without tackling a 400 page tome.  I managed three or four of the short stories last year, by the look of my bookmark, and I look forward to enjoying a few more this year.

Hope your week is going well!  

The Mantel

This year I was excited to change up some of my holiday decor.  For the past umpteen years I have done pretty much the same thing on my mantel and I was getting tired of it.  I persuaded my husband to buy a gorgeous lighted and decorated garland from Balsam Hill during their pre-holiday sale.  It was still pricey even on sale, but I was so happy to have something new to work with.

You will not believe what happened.  Or maybe you will.  We received the garland and excitedly got it into position on the mantel, complete with little Command hooks to anchor it in place.  It was a pretty heavy, what with all the decorations and all.  The lights work by a little battery pack on the left-hand side that you can set to be on for up to five hours I believe.  Anyway, there was this plastic tag hanging off of the battery pack, which I wanted to be cut off, so we could tuck the pack out of sight.  I gave my husband a pair of scissors and instructed him to clip off the plastic tag.  And what do you suppose he did?

Yup.  He cut the wires to the lights.

There was quite a lot of "Oh no!" and "You did not just do that!" and "I cannot believe that just happened."  But it did.
So now we have a mantel garland that does not light up.

Oh well, it's still pretty.  And I can string some fairy lights through it.  Aaarrrrggggghhhh.

Here is a close up of one of my little vignettes on the hearth.  I have a Mary Englebreit Christmas book called "Believe" and my new little barn lantern/snow globe and my red QVC Luminara candles on one side.

On the right, I have a faux arrangement of holly and poinsettias in a basket along with another red candle.  

I am pretty pleased with it after all.  The only downfall is that the mantel is completely full with the garland, so there isn't any room for my stocking holders.  I will figure out another place for them to hang, never fear.  I have these nice wrought iron ones that spell out NOEL, that I got at Pottery Barn a few years ago.  My kids drive me nuts by mixing up the letters so they spell out something else.  They know how to make me crazy.  This is what I mean, see below in last year's holiday picture.  You can also see how much better my mantel is this year!

 

Happy Thanksgiving 2019

Well, this was quite a day.  I was juggling a number of activities and not attending totally to any one of them.  Sara came over and brined the turkey while I was decorating the Thanksgiving table.  I tossed the giblets in one of my husband's precious copper pans and promptly forgot about them.  Sara left to go to work, and I got a notion to run out to buy some new candles. While I was buying the candles, a friend called and asked if I could meet her for coffee at Starbucks.  I did, and we had a lovely chat that lasted an hour.  I got home and was flabbergasted that the house was full of smoke.  Oh.  Right.  The giblets on the stove.  The $200 copper pan my husband loves was charred, the contents incinerated.  The house was still standing, although it was very smokey.  In my hurry to get every window in the house open, I tripped over the lamp cord next to the sofa and the lamp crashed onto the floor and smashed.  Well then.  What else could possibly go wrong?

Did I mention we are having an Arctic cold snap, with temps down to the 30s and snow expected?  And I had to have all my windows open for a couple of hours to air out the house.  Sara arrived four hours later and said "What burned?"  Sigh.  Guess that wasn't all that effective.  Maybe the stench will be gone by Thursday?

Well, my centerpiece looks nice.  That fan-shaped thing is actually a dried mushroom.  Cool.  I used a combination of real chrysanthemums and a few dried natural ingredients and a couple of faux decor pieces.  I used a block of that stuff called "Oasis" that you can stick the flower stems in and arranged it all in a ceramic pumpkin I had on hand.  It turned out pretty well I think.

Instead of making cranberry sauce I spent an hour and a half trying to clean the gazillion dollar copper pan.  I got the outside all shiny again, but there are still scorch marks on the sides of the inside of the pan.  Not sure how to fix that.  Maybe someone with more strength in their arms can scour it off.  What a disaster.  At least it doesn't look as if the pan is ruined, even if it isn't quite as pristine as it was.

This is the little vignette I have on the buffet.  Click on the photo to enlarge it and see the detail. My son in law is part Native American, and I hope the romanticized version of the Indian couple doesn't offend him.  It probably won't, but what do you think?  The figures remind me of the Thanksgiving story I was taught in school in my childhood, and I liked it, even if it isn't realistic.

I am just grateful I didn't burn the house down today and can't think about anything else.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Keeping It Real

I have to say, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed right now.  On Saturday I did try to do a bit of sewing on the Thanksgiving table topper that will not be finished by Thanksgiving.  Those little 3 inch Churn Dash blocks are pretty cute though.  Sewing is going to have to take a back seat to all the other tasks that are on my list this coming week. For some reason, it was as if a light was switched and all of a sudden I am in full Christmas Panic Mode.  Over the weekend I started my Christmas shopping and also worked on the annual 12-month photo calendar of Eva that I give as an annual family gift.  We also managed to do our Thanksgiving grocery shopping.  It seemed as if every minute was packed with some essential task or other.

We have been doing a bit of decorating.  This is our upstairs tree, which you can see from our foyer and main living area.  It is pretty quick to decorate, as the primary decor are some largish Mark Roberts fairies we have collected over the years.  Eva and I got that together in an hour or so.

My husband, the optimist, kept bringing in a number of boxes of other holiday decor, thinking we would slap that together in no time flat as well.  Hah.  I am pretty impressive at what I can accomplish when necessary, but this is ridiculous.

As I write this on Sunday night, those boxes are all still sitting, half unpacked, in the foyer outside our library/den front room.  Friends, this place is a mess. I have a few things unpacked, but it all looks so haphazard I just want to put it all away again and start over.  Some major editing needs to happen this year.  Honest to Pete, we do not have to put it ALL out, right?

And then...and then, I got a notion that the cupboards in my laundry room where I store my candles needed a good clearing out.  Now, this notion is well-founded.  This is a task that is long overdue and which needs doing desperately.  But seriously, not right now.  I must have been trying to hide away from all the decorating my husband was urging me to do.  I am not kidding, he had a little red wagon he would put holiday decor boxes from the garage in, and would then roll into the house cheerfully saying "Here's another one!"  

As you can see, I removed about a dozen candles from the cupboards and got distracted by something else (probably my husband bringing yet another box of holiday decor into the house) and abandoned the project.

Things are in a state of complete chaos right now.  I am thinking I just need to go to bed and repeat Scarlett O'Hara's mantra "Tomorrow is another day".

Eva's Christmas Bedroom

Do you have grandchildren who visit you during the holidays?  It is so much fun to spend a little time and decorate their space with festive holiday decor.  I purchased a few new things for Eva's room, and enlisted her help in putting things together to decorate her space, and it turned out so darn cute.

I started out by purchasing the cutest (and excellent quality) Christmas themed sheet set at TJMaxx.  It was less than $15 for the two sheets and a pillowcase. Next up was an old quilt I made ages ago that worked great with the tree theme.

I am so sorry I cannot tell you the pattern.  I made the quilt over 15 years ago and got the idea from some quilting magazine.  Sorry.  I have no idea.  If I had it to do over, I would not have used the busy background fabrics, and gone for more solid (tone on tone) creams for more contrast.  The effect of this quilt is a bit busy. The trees stand out pretty well though and work well in Eva's room.

The "woodie" pillow was 60% off at Joann, believe it or not, which brought it down from $40 to around $15.  The metal "Tis the season to be jolly" sign was from Walmart for around $6.  We sorted through Eva's gazillion stuffed toys and picked out the white ones to surround her pillows.

This little wooden sign, which was also from Walmart for around $6, is just the cutest thing ever.

This fun room re-do cost very little, and Eva and I spent a delightful afternoon selecting objects to put out and arranging them to her satisfaction.  She collects nutcrackers and loved revisiting them and setting them out on her bookcase.  The investment in some fun seasonal decor items brings so much pleasure to young people.  The fact that the grownups in their lives take an interest in making children's surroundings seasonal and decorative is a wonderful tradition to pass on to the younger generation.  They love the adult attention and the chance to participate in making their environment an expression of their interests.

 

 

Creative Weekend

We had such a creative weekend!  I have been seeing so many YouTube videos where clever women decorate tiered trays with seasonal and holiday decor.  They are quite inspirational, especially if they tell you where they picked up all the components to make their designs.  Some of these clever gals make tiered tray decorations with a theme-such a coffee/hot cocoa bar or fall harvest.  The sky is the limit.  My mission was to make a Christmas themed tiered tray.

To tell you the truth I have had the best luck with Target for decent quality and cute seasonal decor items.  The price hasn't been bad at all either.  I started out at Hobby Lobby and did find plenty of trays and decor, but felt so overwhelmed I had to leave with nothing!  Now that I know what to look for I would do better there I think.

Target was my next stop and I did find a perfect tiered tray, which is by Hearth and Home, Magnolia Designs (you know, Chip and Joanna Gaines from Fixer Upper). It was around $30, a bit pricier than some others I have seen, but so much sturdier and better quality.  Most of the other decorations came from Target, except for the Rae Dunn "Chill" candle, which I found at TJMaxx.

Here is a close up of the two layers of the tray.  The top layer has a plaid tea towel from TJMaxx ($6 for three of them), a sled ornament from Target ($3), a faux evergreen tree I got at my local Ace hardware store ($5), $2 jingle bells from Target and a cute little faux plant in a tin from the Target dollar section.  The frosted berry pick on the right was $1 at Joann.

The bottom tray also has a TJMaxx tea towel, another faux plant in a tin from Target, a white truck (how cute is that?) ornament from Target ($3), two white porcelain houses from Target ($3 each-and the small one lights up!), two bottle brush trees (Target $1 each), another frosty floral pick from Joann ($1).  You can't see it because it is facing the back, but there is a tin birdhouse ornament from Target also ($3).

I got out one of my battery pack fairy light strings and wound it around the handle of the tray stand.  I had so much fun designing this tray and have enough stuff left over for a second one!  In fact, now that I have the tiered tray, I have plans to do up various ones throughout the year to celebrate different holidays and seasons. 

If you are thinking of doing one of these tiered trays, start with the tray, and then chose your focal pieces.  For me, those primary elements were the larger faux evergreen green tree on the top, and the porcelain houses on the bottom.  I have seen a lot of people use holiday mugs, candles or figurines. You can fill in the space with just about any Christmas ornament that will stand up on its own, just remove the hanger obviously.  Little decorative picks and faux greenery fill in the empty spots.  Battery lights are a nice addition.

After the purchase of the tray itself, the expense could have been minimal if I had scrounged around to see what I had on hand, but Target was a powerful draw, and I managed to find a ton of little doo dads there.  And oh my gosh, TJMaxx is amazing for candles at a great price and other decorative items.

I have more things to share, but this post is getting long, so look for more this week!  Ahem, our Christmas trees may already be in the house.