Category: the house

How to decorate a Charlie Brown Tree.

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Every year I am asked about our tree.   We often hear we have the best tree and so I find myself answering the question,  how do I get it to look that way?
We start with a tree that Pat & Edie cut down.  We prefer imperfect looking trees.  After Ashlawn-Highland discontinued the practice of having folks cut down trees from their fields, we found a cut-it-down yourself farm near Covesville that has the sort of trees we like.
This year’s tree started out looking like this.
(That would be the good side.)
First the lights go on.
I like to work from the inside out, starting at the bottom, wrapping lights around the trunk.  When I get to the top, I move the lights out just a wee bit and work my way back down.
That’s what 200 lights look like.
Working my way up and down, out and around the tree,  you can see where I’m slowly filling it in with light.
I took this shot after I had 400 on the tree – getting close, but still, not enough.
 This was where I ran out of lights to be used on the tree. That’s 700 Christmas tree lights. I wanted more lights, but I didn’t want to go out and buy them.  So I stopped there. From the moment we brought the tree in the house Saturday, we’ve realized it’s far wider than we initially realized. So 700 lights didn’t quite go as far as I thought they would. 
I know, there are some out there that think 700 lights are excessive.  I’m strongly considering making sure I have 1000 for next year, just in case. 
Next up come the hanging of the ornaments.  Here it helps to have lots of these as well.
This is where Edie comes in to help. Left to my own devices, I will spend days getting the lights just so before then carefully considering where each ornament should go.  I think 3 days is a decent amount of time spent putting a tree up.  My offspring however, thinks that you should be able to do it in an afternoon. She’s ever so proud that this year the lights went up in one try (there have been years where I’ve taken them down and completely restarted more than once) and they were done in under 2 hours.  This year’s tree trimming was definitely the fastest it’s been probably ever.
The first ornament hung is always this gem, the lone survivor of a set of pipe cleaner and styrofoam balls my parents made their first Christmas together back in 1968.  This was the most ornate of the set and every year this was the one my dad wanted to hang first. I always hang it in a tucked away spot.  It’s definitely a bit worse for the wear, but one I can’t not hang.
Edie’s first ornament this year was this beauty, hung in a spot of honor, smack dab in the front and center of the tree.
Until we got other ornaments hung around it, it was my own little episode of having that lamp in my front window. Thankfully, by the time we were done, it was not as prominent, without me having to rearrange it.  Or knock it off while watering plants. And because that kid can hang several hundred ornaments well in less than an hour, she had it blending it in no time flat.
We have a wide variety of ornaments.  There are ones from Christmas past, like this one:
There the ones Pat & I made and were given as children, like these two:
 
 I made that Jack in the Box in Girl Scouts back in 1978.
There’s also this one, one of my favorites.  I found that at an after Christmas sale the Christmas we were engaged while I was shopping with our mothers.  Could it be any more perfect?  Every year I hang it in a prominent spot.
We have ones Edie made.
And the ones she’s acquired over the years including princesses and Hello Kitty.
Ornaments get hung similar to the way the lights go on – from the inside out, so that the tree has a bit of depth and texture to it. I like to mix them all up, so that the Mary I painted as a toddler is hanging next to a Wise Man painted by my mother from one of those 1970’s wooden ornament kits (anyone remember those?) is hanging next to a vintage Shiny Bright I bought somewhere along the way.
I have a thing for vintage Christmas ornaments.  I have a hard time passing them up at yard sales and estate sales, but these days, unless I find something so spectacular that I don’t already have, I am getting better about walking past.  Not having enough room to store them all helps. 
I finish the tree with a set of glass ‘icicles’ I was given several years ago.  There are about 2 dozen of them in various combinations of colors and styles.  After they are hung, I drape a beaded garland, add the tree skirt and call it a day.

The tree skirt is an embellished vintage item. I was given the plain red corduroy skirt with a red & gold trim and green pom poms.  I added the buttons to look like snowmen and snowflakes.  
And here is the finished tree.  While pictures never do justice to it, you can see what a difference lots of lights and a giant tub (and a half) of ornaments and a few strands of beads do for a perfectly imperfect tree.  The only thing missing are candy canes, which will be purchased and hung in the next few days.
 
And that, dear friends and readers, is how you take a Charlie Brown tree and make it beautiful. They really just need a little bit of love.

Fall Purge.

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Last week when I shoveled out the bottom of the chicken coop to put on my garden, I couldn’t help but notice that my tomatoes had the end of season blight.  Having given up the bulk of the harvest to the psycho squirrels this summer, I was very grateful for the late season comeback, only to be disappointed by what I called the funk. 
Sigh.
So, Saturday I commenced to ripping out my tomato plants, leaving my pole beans, tomatillos and malabar spinach.  Along the way I pulled up some volunteer butternut squash plants too.  I yielded 6 squash (with a few more left in the garden), a nice size basket of green tomatoes for us, the bulk of which I pickled (of course) and a really nice size bucket of tomatoes with blight for the chickens.
I always like to wait until first frost to rip out my tomatoes – they will produce until then and I hate to think of any tomatoes I won’t get.  This year though, it was just too pathetic looking. 
Maybe I can put in a little fall crop though.
Sunday morning, I got up and decided it was the day to finally clean out the attic, a task I’d been putting off for some time.  Years to be honest.
Cleaning out the attic is actually part of the greater list of projects I have lined up for this fall. Technically, it was the last one on the list, but since it was the one I could do by myself and cleaning the attic meant making space in our room, I decided to jump on that instead.
I have a bad habit of just opening the door to the attic space off our bedroom and shoving stuff in.  It had gotten so crammed with stuff, you couldn’t just open the door and shove in.  So, sitting outside the door, spilling into our bedroom was a collection of suitcases (from all the roadtrips this summer), as well as Edie’s camp trunk, the cover for her upright bass and countless other items that didn’t fit in there. 
As I made my way to the back of the attic, I realized I hadn’t gotten rid of any of Edie’s clothes since about the time she finished up preschool.  (She started 5th grade last month.)  Worse, there were infant things I had been hanging onto – her crib mobile, a bouncy seat, the toddler bed rail she used for all of about a week before she convinced us she didn’t need it and a baby gate.  I’m sure I was saving most of this for when we had visits from friends with younger kids, but the fact is, they were totally inaccessible in the back of the attic and by the time I got them out, I realized they just needed to go elsewhere.
A few freecycle posts, a facebook post, an email or two and a shout to the second grade girl across the street and I had those 17 bags of clothes and miscellaneous baby gear out of here. 5 bags went to a refugee family a neighbor is collecting for, one went to Li across the street (including some pieces that have been passed around this neighborhood from little girl to little girl to little girl, like the purple chenille cardigan with fringe that is most beloved) and when Mo came by to take a bag, she offered to haul it all away.  Score!  Thanks Mo.  Still left are the pieces of plywood, 2x’s and tile grout I pulled out of the attic, left over from when we built it out, when I was pregnant with Edie almost 11 years ago.  Pat says he will find a use for them.  I’m seriously eyeballing at hauling them to the habitat store, as we have a basement full of things we might use.
It felt great to purge. I kept a few things – mostly dresses I made Edie or some of her favorite pieces I couldn’t bear to part with, like the seersucker skirt she insisted on sledding in a few times and the adored BabyGap faux fur leopard print jumper that is too fabulous for words.  A few favorite toys and books.  And the rest?  Gone. I was able to put her trunk away and find a spot for the suitcases not piled on top of other stuff and still have room for more treasures.
Meanwhile, Pat was outside doing his own fall purging.
He pruned the peach tree.
It’s supposed to help it put out more fruit.
Considering the squirrels get all the fruit, I applaud him for trying.
Although a smaller tree will make it easier to net and keep the rodents out, so maybe we might get a peach off that thing one of these days.
He also trimmed the saucer magnolia back.  He removed one of the trunks and trimmed many of the lower branches off, so that you don’t have to duck to walk under the tree.
By the front porch there you can see the piles of plywood and bouncy seat I dragged down from the attic, never to be in there again. And the window we replaced last fall that needs to become a coldbox for my garden.
Clearly, getting things out of our house is my happy place, while cutting things is his.
Up next is the basement cleanout.  We need to make room so that the ping pong table can be opened up down there, per Edie’s requests, so she & her friends can hang out down there when the weather is subpar per my request.  I also need to get going on refinishing the desk I got for her room, but I need space to work (which is what really is spurring on the basement cleanout, while the things coming out of her room is what spurred the attic purge.) It seems to be a never ending cycle of get rid of stuff to make room for more stuff, with one project leading to another and another…. Does it ever end?

It happens.

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I used to hear women say they hadn’t had time for shower that day and I would wonder to myself, how freaking hard is it to take a shower?  Especially when it was women with older kids – you didn’t have to worry about what they were doing while you took a few minutes to lock yourself in the bathroom with hot running water.  And most especially when it was women who didn’t work outside the house.  Really, what were you doing all day that left no time for a shower?

I now find myself among those women and I sincerely apologize to all of you that I had previously mentally judged.

Take yesterday for instance.  I got up, got Edie off to school.  I had made plans to meet Nancy at the gym for a class at lunchtime, so I ran some errands and got dinner started and figured I’d take a shower after my workout.  No need for two showers really. I sat down and put together the schedule for my Girl Scout troop for the year, having had a mom’s gathering the night before to finalize our details, and got it sent out.  I realized I wanted to take Snapfish up on their 99 prints for 99 cents deal that expired yesterday because I haven’t printed out any photos in eons and I really should.  So, I started going through photos and uploading them, finding the process much quicker than I had anticipated.  I took off to go to the gym, dinner halfway done, photos halfway loaded, feeling pretty good about things.

And then, somehow, my day got derailed.  I spent a little more time than I had intended at the gym, when Nancy convinced me to try doing pull-ups with her after our workout and stretch.  She’s in great shape and I have noticed a difference in my clothes since I started working out with her on a regular basis, so if she asks me to try something, I figure why not?  Instead of paying for my own personal trainer, I just work out with her.

So I came home and thought I’d finish uploading photos which shouldn’t take too long, because the first round didn’t take long. First the website showed I’d loaded them, then it didn’t, so I went back through and reloaded, only to discover that the first process had gone through, so then I had to edit and sort through which photos I wanted to print.  We’re talking over 100 photos and next thing I knew, it was almost 3 pm.

It was a night I was doing Dinnaah, my meals to go, and I had quite a few orders, as I was serving a very popular curried sweet potato, spinach and quinoa dish.  I went out to the garden to harvest some of my spinach and somehow managed to clip my finger with my clippers while I was harvesting.  I finally got my main dish going on the stove when Nancy showed up, having just picked up her youngest from after school clubs, wanting to know if I could put some books I’d promised her on her Kindle.  So, dinner’s on the stove, and I’m looking on my hard drive for those books when Edie comes through the door with a friend, looking for a snack.  They have exactly 25 minutes to grab a snack, get their gear and head back up to school for soccer practice, so I hand Edie a loaf of baguette I’d baked the night before, tell her there’s cheese and fruit in the fridge, make a fruit & cheese plate.  Her presentation was flawless and even if she didn’t clean up the cutting board and knife, she did wrap the bread & cheese back up and put them away.   So, the girls are chattering away, nibbling on bread & cheese and fruit when Betty comes in, announcing that when I heard her son Ben yelling the afternoon before, it was because he had broken his arm again, the second time since June.  (Edie & I had heard him yelling for his mom and I had started out to check on him because I could hear in his voice something was wrong, but by the time I got up there, Betty was pulling out in her car and now I know they were headed to the ER).  So, while she’s telling the story of Ben’s latest ER broken arm adventure to Nancy & myself, Edie & Claire & Alayna were chattering away, I’m trying to figure out where that book is on my harddrive and making sure I don’t burn dinner.

Just as quickly as my living room filled up, it emptied out, as everyone had places to be.  I finished dinner, got orders wrapped up and was getting ready to start baking cupcakes for my friend Rebecca’s birthday, as I had invited her & her daughter down for dinner in celebration that night.  The phone rang and it was Rebecca, asking if I was ready for her to drop Charlotte off.  She’d asked if Charlotte could come down and play when they first got home when I had invited her to dinner on Thursday, as they were getting ready to go on a trip and she wanted to get packed.  I had somehow forgotten that Thursday was Thursday, meaning that Edie had an after school club followed by soccer followed by an immediate playdate that I had set up for her with Charlotte, only she wasn’t home yet and she had homework she hadn’t done because she’d had yoga club followed by soccer practice and Thursday is THURSDAY.  So I told Rebecca to go ahead and drop Charlotte off, Edie wasn’t home yet, but Charlotte could help me make Rebecca’s cupcakes.

Meanwhile, people were stopping by to pick up dinner and commenting on the fact that we had an empty keg sitting by the front gate.  (We are cleaning out the basement – Pat had intended to use it in brewing beer at home, but then realized that just wasn’t going to happen, so he posted it on Freecycle and left it out there to get picked up, making the entrance to our house resemble the entrance to all the houses I lived in college. The universe is shaped exactly like the earth, if you go straight along enough you’ll wind up where you were.) Charlotte was helping to man the door, help whip up chocolate truffle filled cupcakes (the recipe is one I’ve posted before from Cook’s Illustrated, it’s damn good and quite easy) and write some last minute photo descriptions as part of wrapping up my big free lance project.  Pat had to attend a public meeting on behalf of work last night, thankfully, this one was in town which meant he was only gone but a few hours, but it still meant he wasn’t home and Edie had a question about her math homework that I was totally unable to answer.  Edie surpassed my math skills at some point in second grade and why not ask Betty’s son Ben, who’s good at math. So we ran down there, saw the new cast and after a few eye rolls, both of them expressing complete disdain for me admitting to my shortcomings and making them actually speak to each other, Ben was able to answer Edie’s question in about oh, 5 seconds.

I’m really pretty sure she gets a good idea of what it would be like to actually have an older brother in her exchanges with Ben. 

By the time the homework was done, frosting made and on the cupcakes (again, with a huge effort on behalf of 9 year old Charlotte, who can whip some egg whites by hand I tell you), and I had finally managed to sit down to breathe with a glass of wine, Rebecca walked through the door and it was time for dinner.  We ate, had dessert, the girls put on a show and suddenly, it was 8 o’clock and I was still in the clothes I had worked out in, unshowered.  Cleaning the kitchen took the very last of the energy I had – I was cold, I was tired and I was sore – not sure if it was from my workout and my  big 5 pull-ups earlier in the day or leftover from an earlier workout in the week that I didn’t stretch enough after – or my marathon day that had gone off rail or if I was just sore from being cold, because I now get stiff and sore from just getting cold.  Awesome.  If this is September and I’m 42, I cannot wait for January when I’m say, 60. 

At any rate, by the time I finished arguing with Edie about bedtime and had delivered Ben some cupcakes, I was too tired to bother with a shower, so I just crawled into my own bed, realizing that when I worked in an office and had a younger child,  I had way more time to take a shower.  I’m not sure how I got to this point in my life, but here I am.  I really didn’t have 5 minutes to take a shower yesterday.

Scenes from the week.

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 It’s been a busy week around here.  Here’s some of the highlights.
Playing around with the settings on my camera, I finally figured out the b&w one.  
The Planting Seeds Festival

held at the Buford Garden, had a fantastic turnout and was a success

despite the fact that Mother Nature didn’t fully cooperate.

The whole shebang was moved into the cafeteria at Buford when the skies opened up and the children took over the face painting stand. 
Face painting became full body painting.
Apparently this is what a gang of girls will do when left with a stand full of face paint.
When the headliner, Dar Williams, took the stage
there was dancing and sing-a-longs.  A good time was had by all.

Anniversary dinner of shrimp and grits.

This bug paced the top of my monitor literally all day Wednesday, back and forth, for hours. 
Please ignore the dust.  He did.
My Mother’s Day gift to myself.
A variegated leaf geranium. 
There’s practically a rainbow on every leaf!
My winning streak lately has not been limited to just new fly rods. 
I won a seed giveaway thanks to the Eco Women.
That’s a cosmos popping up from seed.
I also won some apron patterns from Lesa , but I’ve used my rainy days to clean around here, instead of sewing, despite what that picture of the top of my monitor tells you.  Sewing when your hands are covered in poison ivy is not ideal anyway. Neither is cleaning really.
While I was at the nursery, I spied a tag for Becky Mix. 
Of course it came home with me.  They are now planted in the back yard.

Near my new patchouli plant.
Who knew it was a plant?
It has a much softer scent than what you  remember.  There’s no second note of uhm, well, you know.
I was listening to the Dead as I ran errands that day and as I’d already bought and planted my scarlet begonias for the year, I thought why not?

One of the roots of that pesky muscadine vine I’ve been digging up from all over the back yard. 
It’s huge.  I need to take an ax to it.  It’s the size of my foot, maybe bigger and
I wear women’s size 10 shoes.   
I may have underestimated it’s ability to not die.  It’s the energizer bunny of invasive plants.
I threw the hibiscus in a spot of dirt a few weeks ago and despite the neglect, it’s thriving.
I guess it’s earned a weeding and mulching session, hasn’t it?
Just as soon as I dust off that computer monitor and finish hacking away at that muscadine root.
I finally found myself some new canvas gardening gloves so I am going to try to stop ripping roots out of the ground with my bare hands.  Wish me luck.

Our favorite room.

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We have this room on the back of our house that when most people enter, they immediately fall in love with.
We call it the sunroom. 
It is three walls of 4′ tall windows. 
Considering the room has a ceiling height of 7’6″, that’s alot of window.
The windows are old steel casement windows. Some of the don’t quite shut anymore, some don’t open anymore.  They are quite simply glass and metal and energy efficient is not one of their qualities, so we can only use the room three quarters of the year.  But for those three quarters of the year, it’s lovely. And the quarter of the year we can’t use it?  Well, it still gets used, just not in the same way.  That’s when things start collecting out there, because I can throw something back there, shut the door and out of my eyesight it goes. It also works as a fantastic walk-in fridge when it’s cold enough.
It’s really sort of a glorified porch, one that stays dry. The room faces south, with windows on both the east and western walls.  It has a glider sofa, glider chair, stereo and ceiling fan, everything you need to hang out.  Every spring I deep clean it, wiping down the floors, walls, ceiling, getting rid of all the dust that accumulates in there, the spider webs, the stuff that collects.  I do a decent job of staying on top of that room the portion of the year we use it, but then, every spring when we first open the room back up, I am taken aback by the state of things.  Stashing things you don’t know what to do with and closing the door can add up.
In the last few years, Edie’s art supplies have found themselves a home out there, so there is now an easel and bins of paints, pastels, crayons and other implements of artistic endeavors out there. She works out there year round, not letting the chill bother her. I have to say, having just spent the last 24 hours cleaning it and putting it freshly laundered slipcovers back on the furniture, it is a dreamy space.

Long Term Reality

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Can we talk about my back yard?
That’s the current state of it, as seen from the back edge of the property. Well, overlooking the back edge, which is the creek that runs though all the back yards on this side of the street and is then diverted into a pipe under the road.
I don’t have any pictures of what the yard looked like when we bought the house 13 years ago June. 
It was, for lack of a better word, overgrown.  My nephew, who was a wee one at the time, called it ‘a jungle’.  For about 10 years or so before we bought the house, it was a rental.  The interior was maintained, the yard not so much.  Before that, a woman lived here who was apparently quite the gardener who had a fondness for pink, but the last few years she lived in the house, her health was declining and her yard suffered.  What we’ve figured out from neighbors is that the yard, specifically the back yard, was ignored and just left to run wild for oh, a good 15 years or so.   
That’s the view standing at the back of the house. 
We have a large lot – .33 of an acre. Our first priority when we bought the house was to get rid the ivy growing up the sides onto the roof and then cut down the trees growing into the house. The back yard could wait.
13 years ago, we started by taking a lawnmower and a weed wacker to cut a path through the jungle. We laid down newspaper, covered it in mulch and over time, grass grew and it became a path.  When Pat mowed the yard, he’d cut in closer to the jungle every time, so that every year, we claimed a few more inches. We’d walk through, dig up big stuff, cut down smaller trees we didn’t want, pull weeds.  For years, I had a constant patch of poison ivy somewhere on my body between March and November.  There were times it would become a full blown nasty case that required steroids.  Pat spent a lot of time pulling all the poison ivy out by hand (He’s not nearly as allergic as I am.  Also, he knows what it looks like.  Me?  Ha!)
When the sandbox got installed and the tiki hut built, he cleared those areas to be used, but by and large, big parts of the back yard were left untouched.  For a few years, he mowed it all down early, we covered the yard in straw and if anyone asked what the plan was, he’d refer them to me and I, him.  “Oh, Pat’s got something going on down there, you’ll have to ask him.”  It actually did help us get a handle on what was going on back there.

I did some small landscaping around the tiki hut, per Edie’s request, by moving some wild geraniums back there.  I have some more I will move back there.  Another work in progress.
During the microbusts a few summers ago, we lost some big limbs as well as some smaller trees back there on the side that had been previously still jungle.  I started noticing that maybe there was a new sunny spot to plant sunloving plants.  We only have so much sun in our yard and most of that is dedicated to tomatoes and basil.  Any sunloving flowers I have are in a thin strip ‘down by the side of the road’, along the edge of the back yard.  They are running out of room.  I have a lilac and butterfly bush that really could use some space to spread out. 
I have a fig that has lived in a bucket since before we had Edie because we can’t decide where we want to plant it.  We want to give it space to spread out and with sunny real estate at a premium around here, we just haven’t been able to agree to a spot.
The other day it dawned on me that we could start moving into the space of the back yard that had yet to be fully tamed.  We could actually start making inroads to the master plan of what we eventually want the back yard to be.  This was pretty revolutionary. 
Pat and I walked around there the other day, pulling up the first signs of weed life, and put out markers for what is going to go where.  I’m excited to have new holes to dig and super excited to finally feel like we have a plan and a vision to move forward with the back yard.  It has taken us 13 years to get to this part.
It was that or start terracing the hill next to the house into the most macdaddy vegetable garden in the city.  It’s a steep slope, it’s going to take retaining walls and alot of work.  Every winter I consider it, every spring I stand out there and think about it…..and bag it.
This year though, the back yard is finally happening. 
Stay tuned for updates.

Being Me.

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My rhinestone dollar store readers, the ones Edie calls my rock star glasses, had one of the arms snap in half as I was taking them off the other night. 
So I borrowed some of Edie’s tye dye duct tape and taped them back together for the time being.
I am that cheap.
I also didn’t have time to run out and by a new pair that day.
My family is of course, slightly horrified and bothered by the new look. I’m pretty sure they won’t let this last, although we do laugh about it.
Thursday night we met up with some of Pat’s co-workers and other guests (supporters of their organization) at Miller’s before a lecture at the Paramount.  It was my first time meeting some of them.  There was beer, nachos, wings…. 
I grabbed a wing, dipped it in blue cheese, took a bite and realized I had just dripped a huge amount of dressing on myself.  You know how when you try to wipe something off with a paper napkin and it just deteriorates and makes everything worse?  Yeah, that’s what happened here.  Smack dab in the middle of my chest.  Of course I was wearing black.  I spent the rest of the evening trying to politely cover it  – having a drink in my hand worked best. And while I did have a jacket with me, because of the prominent location on myself and the fact that the jacket has no buttons, well, that was no help at all.  Plus it was too warm for a jacket.
I did however, exercise restraint around the nachos. 
After the lecture, Pat’s coworkers, who work at the Richmond office, stopped by as his boss had to pick up the projector for a presentation the next morning and decided to stay to watch the end of VCU game.  I’m pretty open about my lax cleaning skills and my house was definitely not in a presentation for strangers state, especially a group of people I had just met with a glob of blue cheese and paper towel remnants in the middle of my chest.  We were about 2 minutes ahead of them and it’s really amazing how much you can pick up in 2 minutes flat when you know you need to.  It wasn’t until everyone had left however, that I noticed that the downstairs bathroom had absolutely NO linens in it – I had taken up the bath mats and all the towels in there to wash them and hadn’t put any back in.  Sigh.
No towels are better than dirty ones, right?
The lecture was Richard Louv, who wrote “Last Child In The Woods”.  It is hard for me to answer what I thought of his talk – his book, “Last Child” was about connecting kids with nature, although he has a new one out that follows up on idea of Nature Deficit Disorder.  My husband was an environmental educator for 17 years, until he switched jobs last spring, becoming a Riverkeeper, so the idea of connecting kids with nature? That’s our lifestyle.
When I’m not wearing blue cheese and duct taped dollar store readers.  It’s just how we roll.

Back to reality….

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It’s January 2, the big yellow angel came back this morning restoring some semblance of routine to our lives (which was miraculously NOT as bumpy as I had feared!) and as I procrastinate on taking down holiday decorations, I thought I’d show off some of the new things that have worked their way into our home this season.  While visiting Pat’s folks the week before Christmas, we acquired a few quilts that Pat’s Grandmother had made over the years.
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Among them, this crazy quilt.  I remember when she made this one – at the time I was inspired enough by it to contemplate learning to quilt, something I still haven’t entirely let go of, but haven’t entirely embraced yet either…..
The basis of this quilt are old ties that Pat’s Grandfather wore.   I also recognize some fabrics that had been kicking around in her stash (Over the years, I’ve inherited parts of that stash as she scaled back.)
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There is so much detail and handwork in this quilt.  It’s amazing.  I just can’t do it justice with photos. It’s an inspiring piece to have on our bed and wake up to every morning.
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Another quilt we brought home is this Southern Belle Quilt. It’s much older, with more padding than any other quilt we’ve gotten from Grandma, and has been through the wash a number of times so it’s soft and fluffy on top of being beautiful.
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The fabrics in it are amazing, as is some of the handwork.
There is a small tear though, towards the bottom that I’m not entirely sure how to go about repairing.
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I’m looking for help in how to fix the tear (so if you have a suggestion, please let me know!).  For the time being, it’s sitting on the back of the sofa in the living room, folded neatly so the tear doesn’t get worse.  I simply couldn’t put it in a closet until I got it fixed.
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The third quilt we brought home is a butterfly quilt for Edie’s room. She has a bit of a butterfly theme going on in there and I think the browns will help balance out all the pink.  There are a few small repairs to be made this quilt before it lands permanently on her bed, but they can all be easily done by hand.  And, since it’s a newer quilt and I inherited part of the stash, I know I have the original fabrics on hand to make the proper repairs, should I need more fabric.
Suddenly, having the stash just became a good thing.  Funny how that works….

Not quite there yet.

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Currently my living room looks like Christmas has exploded in it.  Boxes everywhere.  The tree is halfway decorated, with oodles more ornaments waiting to be put on.  There are some wrapped presents, some handmade presents to be finished floating around,  decorations that need to go somewhere, plus our usual clutter.

I used to get really worked up about how everything needed to be perfect at Christmas.  The house had to be cleaned from top to bottom, every room needed to be decorated. My mother always said that Santa Claus didn’t come to a dirty house and somehow I still thought that. 

Two years ago, as I was recovering from stomach surgery and just simply did not have the physical energy to deal with it, I realized, Christmas is not in how your house is decorated, it’s not in making sure the tree is perfect,  it’s not in making sure you have the right cookies made, it’s not even about gifts, because Christmas can and will happen without all those things. 

Of course, I myself didn’t remember this until after I had spent the better part of two days making sure the lights on the Christmas tree were *just so*.  I took myself for a nice long walk and remembered that lesson.

So what if my living room looks like Christmas exploded, so what if I just blew the dust off a hallway mirror before stringing lights on it.  From here on out, I’m not going to stress about Christmas and just kick back and enjoy it.

Because you know what?  Santa DOES come to dirty houses.

Counting Down.

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 Many moons ago, I saw a handmade advent calendar somewhere in the blog world and thought, hey, I could do that.  And so I did.
It’s 4 rows of pockets, straight across.  Most of the materials were vintage thrifted items, including the candy cane bias tape around the edges.  To mark the pockets, I used ribbon that I wrote numbers for dates on.  Some of them are barely holding on anymore.  I keep meaning to fix that.  I know I’ve been saying that for the last few years.  Maybe this year is the one it gets done….

The appliqued ornaments and tree boughs across the top were from the Christmas tablecloth my parents received as a wedding gift.  35+ years of gravy and wine stains take their toll you know.
This is just one of the several new lives I’ve been able to give that tablecloth so that it’s still part of our holiday traditions.
 
Over the years, I’ve learned to sync this calendar with the one on the kitchen wall.  While certain activities come back every year, like “Write a letter to Santa”,  “Go Ice Skating” never happened, no matter how much I pushed it.  Some days I just pop a piece of leftover Halloween candy in there and call it a day.   By syncing it with our calendar, I’ve learned to not tell her to bake Christmas cookies the same day as her Christmas concert at school. Not all the activities are holiday based – some, like yesterday’s “Play Uno as a family”, are just things we can all do together.   It’s definitely changed over the years, as she’s gotten older and busier, but it still remains one of her favorite things about this time of year.