Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Early Christmas Present

The Mr. and I bought ourselves an early Christmas present last week (and it arrived before our party - yay!):

(if you look closely, you also get a sneak peek at our face-lifted cabinets, which I hemmed and hawed about here).

I think it's a nice little upgrade from our old fridge:

A big thanks to Nette over at This Dusty House for sharing her source for appliances. You should pop on over to her blog and see her kitchen and the many other things they have done to their house!

More on my kitchen to come (including sources) soon!

Monday, December 12, 2011

Christmas Party, chez nous

I hope you all had lovely weekends! We're getting closer and closer to the Christmas break and I for one can't wait. I can't get enough of Christmas - I love how it stretches out over a month.

To celebrate, the Mr. and I hosted an "open house" style party yesterday - we wanted to do something where all of our friends could come without getting in the way of evening plans and/or kids' bed times. So, we hosted a get together yesterday afternoon. We had a bunch of people drop in before heading off to other events, so I think our timing plan worked well.

One thing I learned for next time - people drink WAY more red wine in the winter than in the summer, so stock up! In the summer I'm always surprisd by how much white gets drank, but yesterday red was king.

Here are some of the elements I captured from the party:
The greens in the vases are from my front door swag project, and the holly is from a plant in our yard.

I wanted to do feather wreaths here, but will have to be something I do next year! I couldn't find boa's where I was looking and ran out of time.

I updated my bar cabinet with some more festive decorations:

It took me almost three years to use these pewter frames (ha - knew I would use them some day! Never pass up a solid Pottery Barn sale item...):

This is what happens when you're dedicated to taking photos for a blog post while setting up for your party:
Yep, I dropped mylittle point and shoot ON the crackers. Well done, non? It was entertaining...so I did a little jenga-block-from-the-bottom move and voila:
And finally, a shot of the table. At this point guests were at the house so I could only squeeze in a few photos before donning my hostess hat.
*PS those "festive" plates weren't our first choice...we have some small plates but only about 12, so the Mr. ran to the store before our party started and these Christmas tree ones were his only choice! What's a Christmas party without a little cheesiness?



Friday, December 9, 2011

Friday faves - Christmas style in the closet

Happy Friday!! We are getting so close to Christmas, hard to believe! Tomorrow, the Mr. and I are hosting a Holiday Open House - looking forward to having some of our friends, new and old, drop by to spread some holiday cheer.

With the holiday spirit flying around, I've put together a collection of some of my favourite looks for the season. Keep in mind that these looks are my wishes if I had an unlimited budget and access to all US stores! :) Enjoy popping into my day dream, and have fun getting ready for whatever holiday events you have coming up!

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Festive flair - part 2

As promised, today we'll take a look at our tree! We have a fake tree, which makes me a little sad because NOTHING beats a real tree (well, nothing except no watering, no falling over, no needles falling...but I digress). Anyhoo, we have a new fake tree that I bought last year on boxing day (amazing deal at good old Canadian Tire). This was its first time out of the box - and all the lights work!  This also marked our first chance to belt out holiday tunes like it was our job...and that we did.

Our tree skirt is makeshift for this year (an as-is Ikea curtain pooled at the bottom...) but I didn't think that a tree skirt would be a good first sewing project to test my skills on! To my own surprise (and delight) all the tree skirts in Style at Home this month are pooled, so I must have been on top of things.
I have a number of ornaments from a wonderful tradition that my grandmother started - she gave me and my sister an ornament each year up until a couple of years ago. She wanted to make sure that we had ornaments so when we moved out and had a tree of our own, we would have something to put on it. I love this idea, and we looked forward to those ornaments every year. We complemented those ornaments with a collection of glass balls. I love having the tree on at night - the glisten of the lights adds the perfect touch to our living room.




Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Festive flair - part 1

The Mr. and I kept very busy this weekend, mostly with a lot of fun stuff, but also adding some holiday flair to our house! Part one is the swag I made for our door - check in tomorrow for Part 2, the tree!

This year, I decided I didn't want to reuse the grapevine wreath I made last year, but I did want to keep the organic feel. I bought a big bundle of mixed evergreen and cedar branches:
On a whim, I bought a collection of gold ornaments from Ikea a couple of weeks ago (figuring I would be able to use them somewhere!):
I laid everything out, and played around with a number of different combinations:
(the intention was to do this outside...and while it was sunny it wasn't as cozy as the kitchen floor...)

Add some ornaments and a wreath hanger, and voila:


In terms of cost, the massive bunch of greens I found at Superstore for $7.99, and the ornaments were $3.99 at Ikea. The wreath hanger and ribbon I had on hand. Total cost for this project - approximately $12 (and I have enough greenery left to do a festive planter for the porch!).





Friday, December 2, 2011

Friday faves - a red Christmas

This is my final Christmas decor themed Friday Faves for this year - enjoy and happy Friday! Since I didn't get to my outdoor decor last weekend I hope to put it up this weekend, and we also have my company Christmas party on Saturday night. I'm sure to be in the Christmas spirit this weekend!
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simple red christmas decoration ideas

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