Featured at Comin' Home

My bloggy friend Donna at Comin' Home is a wonderful lady. She always has a kind word and good advice, and I love reading her posts, so I was delighted when she included my fall wreath in her recent post about fall decorating.



I love the bottles with the reeds she included and my boys are going to make a Thanksgiving garland much like the one she featured.

Go check out Donna's post, it has many ideas for fall decor that are easy to do and are sure to autumn-ize your home. Is that a word? It is now ;D

Spooky mantel!

Granted, the black and white effect is what kills it here, but still, we love our Halloween-ed mantel. The pumpkins are all from our backyard, I left some of the branches on them for a more rustic feel.

My boys helped with the decorating, the center display is made up of my oldest's first Halloween toy given to him by his grandparents, some favorite Halloween books, and a souvenir from Disneyland. They also liked my web ribbon so it was added on the sides.

Hope you liked our spooooooooky mantel, I think all the candy up there makes it a little less scary ;D

Door Decor and CSI linky parties

Today I am linking up my Fall Wreath to Rhoda's awesome Door Decor link party and to the CSI project! - go check them out!

Fall Wreath for $5 and change

I got the idea for a wreath with my last name initial on it from my friend L at Challenging Martha - she made a super cool fall wreath and I had $5 in my pocket, so I hit up the dollar store and dug out some leftover scrapbook paper I had from a project I will share with you tomorrow.


I started with a wreath form, some greenery/flowers in fall shades, ribbon, and brown leaf forms - there went my $5.

I played around with the "ingredients" and the floral wire I had leftover from the lavender wreath I made this past summer.

I have to admit I preferred the wreath form from Walmart because it was fuller, but it was a little more $ and I wouldn't have been able to get the rest of the stuff for my fall wreath, so I made do with the skinnier, and lighter-in-color wreath form from the dollar store.

I made a letter B from orange scrapbook paper, and glued it onto black cardstock that was glued onto an oatmeal lid, for stability. Then I punched a hole through the paper and lid, and used more floral wire to hang it from the bow I made with the ribbon:


Notice how the wreath blends in really well with my door. I kinda don't like that. I think a dark chocolate brown door would be more awesome, but that's a project down the list for now.


I love my fall-toned wreath - the lavender wreath now resides between the windows that face onto the front yard, and looks lovely there with the window boxes and more lavender below. Now it is this beauty's turn to grace our front door, and I am very happy with the result.


I hope you liked this little project - I had lots of fun making it, although stuff kept coming up and I started it over three weeks ago!

Thank You!!!!

To everyone who voted for me at Leen's customer pic contest - I won! I get a $50 GC to her fabulous store, I am currently going through her designs and I'll share with y'alls what I end up choosing - thanks again!!!

My house colors

We're in the middle of a little living room project:



and I had to look up my living room wall color. I did a post about my house paint colors in my last blog so I thought it better to list them here for future reference.


Our master bedroom has a sponge-finish treatment on the wall combining the 2 shades of tan. The wall where the lovely mirrored closet doors got the dark burgundy but lord knows I regret that decision. My plan is to do away with the closet doors completely and paint the wall to match the rest of the bedroom.


Our living room has a similar warm palette but instead of the burgundy we've added a dark chocolate brown accent color in the form of our new IKEA TV console and the project we are currently working on, which will be painted to match the console.


My little man's room has two shades of light blue, and we seriously need to upgrade his bedroom soon. Aside from a few Mickey-themed items, there's nothing else there and he outgrew Mickey a couple of years ago.


My kitchen/dining room colors are super warm and cozy, I talked about the changes we made 8 years ago in this post.

My bathroom got a cheerful coat of bright, warm yellow paint, which I continue to love, and it's going to get remodeled in the next couple of months (fingers crossed) - I'm debating tile choices.

The paint color is Ralph Lauren's Chamois. The cabinets were painted dark brown, echoing the living room console.

I will be updating the progress on our living room project in a few days!

A wreath on my door

I love the smell of lavender. I am lucky enough to have some growing in my backyard. I have made sachets to give as gifts before but I decided it was time to make a nice wreath for my front door.

I started with a wreath form and floral wire, both totaled under $5 at Walmart:


My lovely lavender sat to the side while I arranged stems on the wreath form:


Halfway done - I decided I like really full wreaths, and considering buds will fall off, I wanted to add more to this:


The finished wreath perfumes my front door, I don't know why I didn't do this earlier, it was so easy and cost so little!


I have lots of lavender left over, so I can still make my usual sachet gifts, which people love to receive.

Hope you enjoyed this craft!

The one where the bees go "WTF??"

because all the lavender that was here:


is now here:


ready to meet its (decorative) end.

Sorry bees!

Gallery wall

First, a happy birthday to my mommy today!

Recently my husband had the idea of framing some of the many (believe me when I say many) pictures we have taken. He wanted a large-scale gallery wall, with 18x18 photos surrounding our TV.

We had recently purchased a new console for all the TV components and really liked the look, but wanted some more color = photos!
We had the photos enlarged and printed at FedEx Office and then we trimmed them down to size and matted them on laminated backerboard.

We used large velcro dots to mount them on the wall so we can easily switch them out when needed. I chose some of my favorites -
On the right side there are two pics of our youngest, with me in all his bald-headed glory, and below in what we call his "Blue Steel" pose.

On the left is my oldest - the top photo is his first time at the beach with daddy, and below is a fairly recent shot that I just adore.

It was really tough to choose just a few shots of my boys, there are so many that I love!

The top center shots were taken during our first (and so far, only) cruise last year.The left is the shore in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the right is one of the islands we visited. Lovely memories.

Our plan is to print out new pics for fall/winter and swap them out as we like. I love seeing my favorite faces every day - not just in real life, but also up on my wall :D