Home for the Holidays

I realized the other day I hadn't shown you my holiday decor this year and it's almost Christmas!  It has really snuck up on me this year.  I used most of my same decor from last year with a few new additions.

Our main tree in our family room...

and our smaller silver tree in the kitchen nook

I picked up this little deer (or maybe it's a buck?) at Goodwill last year for a dollar

I switched things up a little bit in our dining room this year.  The mirror was sitting in the garage (my mom found it for me for $5 I just gave it a little makeover)  The advent calendar is a 90% off after Christmas steal from Target and one of my favorite pieces of Christmas decor.

a friend of ours gave me these awesome brass deer candle holders, aren't they cool?  

the driftwood got a little Christmas decor too...

I don't usually do much decorating upstairs but I decided to add a few pieces of Christmas decor to the landing area at the top of our stairs this year

this Santa was $5 at Marshall's a few years ago after Christmas and another favorite of mine.  I'm a sucker for anything mercury glass

and this mercury glass apothecary jar was a gift from my mother in law

Can't believe tomorrow's Christmas, hope you have a wonderful Christmas Eve!

Holiday Tables

We had an event at church about a month or so ago called "Home for the Holidays."  I'm a little late in writing this post but maybe some of these tables will inspire a Christmas table setting for you.  I was in charge of decorating one of the tables and decided to go with some decor items I already had laying around the house supplemented with a few dollar store items.  Most of the round table cloths I could find weren't log enough to drape the table the way I wanted them to so I used a flat sheet from our bed, I washed it of course :)  

Actually, now that I think about it almost all of these items came from the Dollar Tree: the plates, napkins, glasses, snowflake "chargers", etc.

and here are some of the other tables the ladies decorated...

and this one was designed by my fabulous sister

Do you do any fancy table settings for the Holidays?  

I'll be sharing the rest of my Christmas decor tomorrow!  Anybody else find it hard to take good blog pictures this time of year?  When I leave for work it's dark and when I get home it's dark.   

Ruffled Cribskirt

From the moment we found out we were having a girl, I knew I wanted to do a ruffled crib skirt.  At first I thought about rigging a ruffled shower curtain from urban outfitters, but I just couldn't imagine forking over $80 for something I was going to chop up.  Then, I thought about just cutting long strips of fabric and making my own ruffles, but just the thought of that exhausted me.  I found similar ready made versions online but they were over $200 and I definitely couldn't justify that.  So, I had pretty much given up on the idea when I came across these ruffled curtain panels at Goodwill.  I think my mom actually had some of these when we were growing up, only I'm pretty sure they were mauve or country blue to go along with our hearts and geese lamps ;)  

They had 4 panels so I grabbed them all and gladly paid the $10 asking price for all four panels.  

  

To my surprise they actually still sell curtains like these, and for $50/pair!  Here are some from the so appropriately named country curtains website.

So back to the crib skirt.  I started out by making a basic crib skirt.  Basically I just sewed four panels together.  I only made it three sided since I knew one side of the crib would be facing the wall.

I did not take any progress pictures, but I simply cut the ruffles off the curtain and sewed them in rows onto the panels that would hang down.  We are getting our crib on Thursday so I don't have any staged after pictures but these give you an idea of what it looks like.  

Even with the ruffles already made, this project took me around 3-4 hours.  I can't imagine if I had done it all from scratch.  I think the total cost ended up being around $15, not too bad.  This concept could be adapted for a shower curtain, regular curtains, or even a normal bedskirt.  So next time you are at at thrift store and run across some country curtains maybe you'll give them a second look!

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I think this is one of my favorite projects.  I was so excited to get started on it for the nursery.  It started out, like most things, with Pinterest.  I found this light and thought it was really neat.  Of course, my DIY wheels immediately started turning, because this little beauty will set you back several hundred dollars.

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Do you ever run across DIY projects gone terribly wrong at the thrift store?  I've been known to donate a few myself, but it appears this is what we have here.  The person who did this must have really loved the color red.  I think they took a can of red spraypaint and just went to town.  The light bulb was red too.  A little strange, but I saw the potential and snatched it up for $5.  It included the light kit too, bonus.

I ripped off the fabric portion of the lamp shade until I was left with just the frame for both the top and bottom.

Then, I picked up this hardware cloth at Lowe's for $10.  It took a while for the guy at Lowe's to understand what I was looking for, "Um...it's that stuff that keeps rabbits out of the garden?  I'm making a birdcage light out of it?"  Finally he figured out what I was talking about ;)  I have plenty left over for other projects too.

and some floral wire from Hobby Lobby

I cut the hardware cloth to size, letting it overlap just a little, using some heavy duty wire cutters.  I would highly recommend wearing gloves for this step.  Let's just say I did not and it was not pretty.

Once I had it all wired together and secure, I spraypainted the whole thing gold.  Then I gathered some birds from the dollar store, Hobby Lobby, and save on crafts.  The inspiration light had wire rods for the perches but I went the more rustic route and used some branches from our backyard.  I like the extra texture it gives too.  I hot glued the birds to the branches and placed them through the holes of the hardware cloth.  They are just resting there in case I ever want to rearrange them.

Since the bulb was going to be exposed, I opted for an old fashioned filament bulb from Lowe's like this one.

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Multiple Makeovers

Sometimes things in my house get multiple makeovers.  I like to repurpose things and move them from room to room and sometimes they don't always work when I move them to a different room so I spruce them up a bit.  For instance, this cabinet we had in our guest bedroom is now in the nursery.  It would have worked perfectly fine if I had kept it white but I just couldn't help adding another fun pop of yellow in there.  

So, I'll remind you of the first before, a $29.99 cabinet from Goodwill

and the first after, I liked it but just wanted something different for this room...

and now the final, for now, after :)  The color is yellow magnolia by martha stewart for anyone who is interested.  I used frog tape to tape off the white square, worked like a charm.

see those bookshelves peeking out on the side?  I borrowed the idea from the talented freckles chick's nursery for her new baby girl.  If you haven't seen it definitely check it out.  Since we are short on storage space in this room, making the most of the areas we have is really important.  So, I added these acrylic greeting card displays to the side of the cabinet.  There are several websites that sell them but mine had to be smaller than most to fit this narrow cabinet.  I found them here for around $4.50 each and they fit perfectly!  

I added her monogram to this lampshade we already had using my silhouette and some vinyl.

The mirror was repurposed as well.  It went from brown to metallic gold for a little more glam.

the nursery is really starting to come together, speaking of coming together, our family of two will be a family of 3 in only 12 short weeks!  Where has the time gone?!?