Merry & Bright...Our {HoMe} at Christmas!

Hello y'all, and Merry Christmas! It's hard to believe that Christmas less than 2 weeks away! My goodness, the time has flown! We've been in the holly jolly spirit around here since before Thanksgiving, so I figured it was about time I showed y'all some pics of our holiday home! I had a lot of fun this year decorating, and almost every room in our home has some Christmas spirit. Here are just a few pics of our home at Christmastime...

...I found this branch outside in our wood pile and knew it would be the perfect perch for my little Christmas bird!

I had fun making some glitter letters this year...

..."May your days be merry and BRIGHT!!!"

Our mantel with its large stone surround is the perfect backdrop for some Christmas decorating!

JOY!!!

The Nativity...which Johnathan had fun setting up!

The empty drawer from this dresser became a shelf on the wall...as seen later in this post!

I love our stockings...especially the ones that represent our sweet babies in Heaven...from left to right: Johnathan's, Aaron's, Gideon's, Angel Baby #1, BoBo's (our dog!), Angel Baby #2, Daniel's, Mine and Eli's stocking. NINE!!!

A Christmas wreath I made using sheet music paper chains.

Just some holiday stuff on a wall in the living room...with the drawer turned wall shelf!

The living room, all decked out for Christmas!

I didn't want to deal with the boys unwrapping presents under the tree before Christmas...so I dragged in a dresser we weren't using and I'm using it as my present table! So far the boys haven't even taken notice of it! ;)

I found these awesome shutter doors in an alley near my sister's house about a month back...they are the perfect place to hang up Christmas cards and photos...just slide 'em into the slot and they are beautifully displayed!

Another view of the living room.

Merry Christmas!

Blessings, Grace

Linked up to The Inspired Room

& to Nesting Place

My Autumn Mantel

Nothing fancy this year for my my fall mantel. Just a few autumnal pieces to give my mantel the feeling of fall...


...you can just barely see the little ticking pumpkin I made...I made a few of these little babies with both ticking fabric and burlap...they turned out really cute!


My Fall Mantel/Fireplace...complete with my basket full of firewood...and we actually already had a fire, and it was beautiful!


Happy Fall Y'all!
Blessings, Grace

Cozying it up for Fall {Coffee Sack Pillows}

***Yes, it's been about 5 months since I last posted...no, I didn't fall off the face of the earth, yes, I still love to blog...but lately I've been doing more "living blogging" about life with my boys than crafty blogging. Since I last posted we moved across state, my husband finished residency and started working in a multi-specialty medical group (Yay, honey!) and we have settled into a new community. I am LOVING decorating our new home...and hopefully some day (maybe soon, maybe not) I'll share some photos of our new digs...but, in the meantime you'll get some scattered posts when I feel the urge to make something creative!***

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With Fall (supposedly) approaching I have been wanting to cozy up our home a bit. Since we're fairly new to this house, and there are a lot of blank walls that I have no clue what to do with, I've been struggling with how to make our house more homey. Enter pillows, my go-to home decor element that seems to instantly adds a statement to any room. I've had these on my agenda to make for a while...I got the burlap coffee sacks off of Etsy a couple months ago...but I never found time (or made the time) to make them 'til today. And no, I certainly did not let my son watch a couple hours worth of his favorite Huckle shows while I made them so that he would stay out of my way, of course not! ;)

I got all my sewing stuff out during baby brother's naptime and got them pretty much made before he woke up. I am so happy with how they turned out and I love the warmth and texture they bring to our living room. Tell me what you think!


Linking up to http://www.theshabbycreekcottage.com/







Blessings,
Grace

My {Spring} Mantel

Spring is in full bloom here and the bug to decorate for the season has definitely bit me...problem is we're moving relatively soon and I just don't have the desire to purchase anything new to update my mantel...however, with just a few items that I found while packing up my home I came up with the perfect solution to cure the bug to decorate for spring...problem solved!

The antique window has been on my mantel for a while...I just love it so much so I don't switch it out. In fact, my mantel had stayed pretty much the same for a while now with just a few things being switched out or rearranged.
I grabbed up the burlap frame that used to be in my craft area and gave it a nice coat of blue paint and then added some cute little chalk board frames that say Blessed be the Name of the Lord...

...then I snatched up the little white frame that used to be under this silver nest holder and just kept it simple with a piece of scrap book paper inside for some pattern...

...and this is what it changed from. My previous "fall" mantel (although it too looks a little spring-y...I don't like "fall" colors!).


And again, here it is now! Easy-peasy update!

Happy Spring!!!

Blessings, Grace

I am linking up to Beth's Spring Mantel Party at:

{Pretty} in PINK: Blooms

Earlier this week I was reading a favorite blog of mine and was inspired to pink it up a little around here. Being that I live in a house full of boys...the hubby (a boy, obviously)...two sons...heck, even the dog is a boy...it's not often that I get to see much pink. I wouldn't consider my home overly masculine by any means, but I usually stick to fairly neutral colors and the "colors" that I do use are blues/greens/whites/shades of brown...so nothing that just screams girl! So, the easiest (and cheapest) way for me to add a little pink was to hit our local grocery store and grab a $4 bunch of bright pink baby roses. I think that I got 13 roses for my four dollars...not bad! They add the perfect amount of pink to bring a little girlie-ness to my home.

Isn't their color just lovely???

I like their pretty pops of pink on my kitchen windowsill...don't look too close, I didn't clean the window (or sink for that matter) for the pic! ;)

This little bloom fell off her stem, but still has plenty of life in her nestled in this cute little egg cup.

And these 3 lovely ladies are just now starting to really open up...

...I {LoVe} pink roses!

$4 roses in an up-cycled bottle...cheap thrills! It really is the simple things in life that are the sweetest!

Pink it up in your home too!

Blessings, Grace

I {Finally} Caved: Chalkboard Style

Okay, so we all know that chalkboards/chalkboard painting has been super hot in the blog/DIY decorating world for awhile now...but, I have resisted doing anything with it even though I really love the look. I really loved how you could personalize your home the way the folks over at TLC did with THIS spring-inspired mantel...and I love the way that Sarah Down Under used her chalkboard paint in an unusual yet creative way...and I always love the uses that MMS comes up with when she puts a modern twist on the ol' chalkboard...still, I resisted...that is until now!

A couple of weeks ago I was reading my sweet SIL's blog and saw this...and I knew I couldn't resist any longer...and like Kayla said "who can resist a cute little chalkboard thingy?"...not me, that's for sure, even though I sure tried to, hard! ;)

After seeing those cute little chalkboard tags I knew I could let go of my aversion to writing with chalk long enough to jot something down on those little tags, used in a creative way in our home. And, after reading her post about those lil' cuties I really couldn't wait to go to World Market to get some of my own. So much for resisting chalkboards, I was ready to give in!

It's been a bit chilly here, especially for our part of the state, and being stuck indoors for a part of last week gave me plenty of time to organize some less than neat areas of our home. Chalkboard tags to the rescue! I set about organizing our DVD collection, and this is what I came up with...


...now this is a piece of furniture that I definitely wouldn't call "my style"...but organizing it makes it much easier to live with, haha! I took almost 100 DVDs out of their cases (donated the cases to Goodwill) and put the movies into plastic movie sleeves that I purchased at Target. All of those movies fit into these 3 baskets, which I already had...what a space saver! The "Family Friendly" basket holds all our non-animated movies that our boys can watch (I have a separate area for all our kid movies)...and the "A-M" & "N-Z" baskets hold all of our other DVDs. I don't actually have the DVDs alphabetically organized within the baskets...if they fit the criteria on the tag, that's the basket they're in, but we have to just go through them once we get to the basket...I think that if I did have them organized in the basket I would go crazy making sure they stayed that way. This way I avoid that hassle. There is such a thing as being too organized! The basket on the left of the very bottom shelf hold the remotes and the small basket with the ticking fabric top holds extra candles that I keep stored there when not in use.

Anyways, I finally caved in the chalkboard arena, a little bit at least! But I still can't stand writing with chalk...maybe I should try out those chalkboard markers I've heard about...

Blessings,
Grace

Keepin' Cozy in 2011

Wow, so this blog has seriously suffered from an extreme lack of posts...that only means that my "personal life" has been overflowing with what comes with being the mommy of an extremely active almost 3 yr. old boy and an almost even more active 8 month old baby boy, along with planning for a big move and just the regular daily happenings. We have been busy with life around here, so I apologize, dear blog, you have been left on the back-burner for way too long, and I haven't even told you Happy 2011 yet!

Happy Two-Thousand-Eleven, Blog! Hope it's a good one for ya! ;)

The weather here is fairly mild, but you just can't go wrong with the cozy glow of flickering flames from a fireplace. So, in the absence of a "real" fire, I made this little display to add some ambiance to our evenings here at home. I used the mason jars which I already had and bought candles of different sizes. Normally I go for scent when I buy candles, but for this display I went with color...even tho the candles that are scented do smell pretty good.

I used the floral pillow for color inspiration. I just love the clean crispness of white paired with the blue and green. I am planning on using these colors a lot throughout our home once we move away from our rental here...I have been having fun thinking of the color scheme for our next place.

I know this is a horrible picture...but you can get the idea of the coziness that my little fireplace brings to the room. It is really quite quaint, haha!

Blessings for 2011!

Grace