Christmas Around the House

I love Christmas and I love decorating my home for the season.  Here are a few of my Christmas decorations. There are a lot of pictures so grab a hot cocoa and enjoy.

Thanks so much for stopping by. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and get everything you wished for. 

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I'm in the Spotlight

I'm over at Junk Chic Cottage today in the Saturday Spotlight Series.

Thank you Kris!

I hope you will pop over there for a visit.

 

Hope you all have a lovely weekend!

Living Room Shelves

I have a love hate relationship with shelves.  They can look beautiful and they hold lots of pretties or books, but they are difficult at times to decorate.

 

 These shelves beside my fireplace have always been the most difficult for me to accesorize. So I picked a theme (wine) and collected everything I had around the house that had to do with wine.

I had found this wine rack at Goodwill a few weeks earlier and added the numbers to it to dress it up.

And this is what I ended up with.

Thanks for stopping by and remember to decorate with items you love. 

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10th Anniversary of Book Club

It is hard to believe that my book club has been meeting for 10 years.  We have read many wonderful books and had many, many laughs along the way.  I wanted to do something extra since it was our anniversary.  Here are some of the decorations I made for the occasion.

I had a few books that we have read over the years and used them in my table centerpiece.

I wish I would have take photos before I put the candies on book pages, I think it would have looked better in the photo. But, who can resist candies?

Just for fun I selected the first lines of some of the books we had read over the years.  It was fun seeing the girls trying to figure out what book they were from.

For a treat I made what my book club has named "Beach Brownies" since we made them for the fist time on a beach trip we took.  To make these wonderful brownies you mix up a brownie mix according to the package, stir in coconut pecan frosting, pour in the pan and top with chocolate chips and pecans, then bake according to the package.

This is the book we read for this month.  My club rated it 4.3 out of 5 stars. It's a great book!

 

For a little parting gift I made up these cute little book worm baggies.

Thanks for stopping by.  I would love to hear what all of you have been reading this summer so feel free to leave a comment and let me know.

HAPPY READING!

Coffee Bar

I have always wanted a coffee bar.  I have admired the many pictures of coffee bars on Pinterest and other blogs and finally decided to create my own.  Here is a picture of the final project.

Here is how it started out.

During

I knew I wanted to paint a graphic of some sort on the top so I headed over to the Graphic Fairy blog and found this wonderful graphic. I enlarged it and traced it on the raw wood.

I had some old carbon paper that I used to trace the pattern on the wood.

I then painted the graphic a light gray color using teeny tiny brushes.  The smaller the brush tip the better for this part.

After the paint dried I stained the top using a dark walnut stain and finished it off with a matte polyurethane. 

I love how it turned out!Coffee anyone?

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Books on the Mantel

I love books!  I especially love old books and when putting my mantel together I decided to use some old books I had lying around.

I especially like the cover of this Natural Music Reader book.  I have had this book for a while and I don't even remember where I got it.

This picture I purchased at an antique mall last year when I traveled to Savannah, Ga. That was such a fun trip! You can click here to see some of the pictures I took on that trip.

You would think mantels would be any easy space to decorate but I struggle with this area of my house more than any other.  I love the way it turned out, it probably has something to do with the books. It makes me want to sit down in my favorite chair and start reading.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have time to curl up with a good book sometime this winter.

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Winter Buffet

It is always hard after the Christmas decorations go down to make my living room look as beautiful as it did in December.

But this year I had some inspiration.....a dear friend of mine gave me these cute little white bibles for my birthday and that is were this whole vignette started.

I also found this brown and black movie reel box that they used to use to mail movies in at one of the local antique shops.

The label on the end said it once had the movie Mighty Joe Young in it from 1949.

Sadly the movie reel was not still in the box, but I loved the box so much I went ahead and got it.

I added a few other elements from around my house...

such as this old postcard postmarked 1914 and....

this is what I ended up with.

I hope all of you are getting a great start to your 2014!  Thanks, as always, for stopping by.

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