Grand Opening Give Away at One of My Favorite Blogs

Susie at Bienvenue has opened an etsy store, and it is full of her wonderful hand-painted signs. She has a giveaway going on now at her blog. Check it out here.

Have a great day...I'm working on cleaning closets and taking down Christmas. I'll be back later this week with pictures of my after Christmas deals!

Our Christmas

Hope you all had a very merry Christmas!

Yummy...Hot Chocolate Bar!

I am hosting several get togethers over the next few days, and have set up a coffee and hot chocolate bar in the kitchen. I made a yummy hot chocolate mix that I found online and have added candy canes, marshmallows, andes mints (yum!), and will have cool whip and creamer in the pewter bowl on ice. My sweetie made some fork easels for me too! (Don't you love them?!) I will have two coffee pots on the table, one with coffee, and one with hot water.

A couple of my homemade Christmas gifts...

Since we had one of our family Christmases last week, I figured I would show you a couple of the gifts I made.

The first is a monogram sign, my first shot at it, and I think it turned out alright considering.

The next one is a hairbow holder and some hairbows for my new niece. I wish I had done her name bigger, but overall, I was pleased with how it turned out.

I have been having so much fun looking around blogland at all the Christmas decorations and gift ideas! I hope to be updating my list of blogs soon to show which blogs I'm visiting. My current list is a tiny fraction of where I go!

Have a great weekend!

Freezer Paper Stencil Tutorial

Alright, here goes my first ever tutorial! I learned this from other places on the web, and you can google "freezer paper stencil tutorial" for more help and ideas.

These are the supplies you need:

1. A roll of freezer paper (Freezer paper is similar to wax paper, except that it is "shiny" on only one side. This is very important. Wax paper will NOT do the job! It will ruin your iron!)

2. Cutting board

3. Craft knife

4. Template (mine has my girls' names)

5. Iron

6. Whatever you are decorating (mine here is a bag, you can use clothes, aprons, bibs, socks, anything you can iron)

7. paint

8. Scotch tape

Here are the steps:

1. Trim around your template, and tape it to the freezer paper on the dull side. The shiny side should be face down.

2. Cut around your template with a razor knife. Be sure to save any "islands".

3. When you've cut everything out, remove the template and tape from paper. It may rip the top layer off of the freezer paper just a bit, but that's ok.

4. Iron the freezer paper into place. I use whatever heat is appropriate for the fabric I'm using. I iron down the big piece, then go back and add the small pieces to iron down more precisely.

5. Paint in the areas as you wish. (on thinner fabrics, it is helpful to put something inside the shirt, bag, etc to keep paint from bleeding through.

6. Let the paint dry, then peel off freezer paper.

7. Admire your work!

I decorated around the bag some more, but this is enough to show you what you can do.

Here's one more picture that I forgot about yesterday. You can let your kids paint on this stuff and use it for wrapping paper!

Works For Me Wednesday - Freezer Paper

I love freezer paper! It is really useful in many ways!



Here's how I used it as a stencil for some craft projects...




I've also seen a couple of people do the stencils, and have it ready for kids to paint at birthday parties! Check out Grace Violet's birthday party for her little girl.

It's also great for covering tables for art projects and cooking!




Check out what works for other people at Works for me Wednesday at Rocks in my Dryer

Christmas House Tour

I'm joining in on Kimba's Christmas Open House. Here are some pictures of my house. If you are either one of my regular readers (Hi Mom!), some of these pictures are repeats from a few days ago.


Come on in...

This is our playroom/den mantle.

Our kitchen...

Our living room...


Another spot in our living room...

Our Christmas Tree in the Living room/ Dining room...

and, back to the playroom/den...

Head on over to Kimba's to see who else has their house open for you to see!

Christmas baking!

We decided to do some baking for gifts this year, so the girls and I were busy today! I made fudge and chocolate-dipped pretzel sticks, and the girls and I made reindeer cookies. Here are some pictures from the day!

Here is a picture of the kitchen part-way through the baking session.

Here are what the bags looked like. One bag shows the front of the card, and the other shows the back. This picture also shows the finished products!

Mary Helen and Anna decorating the cookies.

Check back tomorrow for the Christmas house tour hosted by Kimba at A Soft Place to Land.

Some more of our Christmas decorations

Here are some snapshots of our Christmas decorations!

This is the playroom mantle.

The playroom tree...

The living room tree...

and the front of our house...

Showing off my garland

Ok, I have had too much fun looking at all the garland at the Nester's party! You have to check it out here

So, even though so many of them put mine to shame, here is mine (at least so far!)





They, of course, look much better at night. The cord by the double doors still needs to be tacked back so it's not so obvious. In the kitchen, I plan to add some pretty ornaments, but a sick child and a nearly sick mama have kept me from getting out today. Sofar, my garlad has cost me less than $5, and that was for the sparkly stick things that I used in there and the tree.

Hopefully the garland in the kitchen will look good after I get the ornaments in it!

Thanks for taking a look!

WooHoo! The Christmas spirit has hit!

I helped my grandmother decorate her house for Christmas yesterday, and it made me decide I want to put my trees up.

I love Christmas! I will post pictures when I get everything done tomorrow (hopefully tomorrow!)

We also watched the Charlie Brown Christmas special last night which really put me in the spirit...we have been working hard to teach our girls the real meaning of Christmas. I love that the major networks are still airing the Charlie Brown Christmas that tells the real Christmas story.

I hope you are all keeping Christ in Christmas!

A quick, cute story about our Anna today...as I was putting up the Christmas tree, she came in and squatted beside me as I was tucking lights in the tree. She looked at me and said, "Good job, high five!" That's the most she's said all at once ever, I believe! It made it totally worth pulling the tree out of the garage!

I'm still here!

Well, I have pretty much neglected my blog, but I have been busy getting ideas from lots of very creative bloggers out there! I have also been working on making some of our Christmas presents...I have had fun crafting away! I will try to post pictures after I give the gifts (since I do have family members check in here from time to time!).

We did get some good pictures of the girls last week, a good friend of mine went out with me and snapped away...these are better pictures than I've ever paid for!

Fall is in the Air!!

I love this time of year! I love the colors, the smells, open windows, blue jeans, long sleeves, candy pumpkins, the fair in town...the list goes on and on!!

Here are some pictures of what I've done so far to get our house prettied up for fall!

Our dining room table - it looks really cozy in the evening with the candles lit!


The island in the kitchen:


The front door (don't you love those pumpkins?! My aunt got them at a thrift store!)


And this is in our front yard. Joel is going to bring me some corn stalks, but I need something else. Just more pumpkins? Hmmm...


Sorry I've been such a bad blogger, I'm not going to promise to get better, but I've been missing it!

No School This Week!!

Mary Helen left this morning to go to the beach with Joel's mom for the week. Joel, Anna, and I will head over Wednesday afternoon until Saturday.

I have been doing some fall cleaning, and some fall decorating. This is probably my favorite time of year. I love the weather cooling down, the colors, and the smells of fall. Come Christmas, I'll be loving that season too, but for now fall's my favorite! I've been getting all kinds of ideas from blogland of fall decorating ideas...I just need more time, space, and money for all of them!

I will work on some pictures when I get all my fall stuff out. For now, here are some pictures from Mary Helen's birthday party that I never posted!