December Sky

We looked out the window  in the late afternoon and early evening and the backyard looked pink.  We said "Why is the yard pink?"  And then we went outside to have a look and this is what we saw:

Pretty cool.  But instead of the sky looking pink where the sun was setting, it was on the other side of the sky.  Kinda weird.

This one is my favorite

Isn't Mother Nature Awesome?

A little Holiday Cheer

http://www.jibjab.com/view/ZftkHyQyT2ScMnmUsrnMEw

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These things are so silly, but I love making them!

If Dogs Could Talk.........

What do you think these two would say?

P.S.  Christmas came early for me and I got a brand new camera.  Yay!!!!  I'm back in business.

Christmas in the kitchen

I like adding touches of red in the kitchen.  I think it goes well with the gray granite and stainless steel. 
This is a little vintage vingette in the corner of the counter.  Say that ten times fast!

Red beads strung in front of the kitchen window.

 

Another countertop decoration

I tied red fabric to the backs of the kitchen chairs and placed these trees in a tray on the table.

It all makes for a fun, festive kitchen.

Some Christmas on this Blog

I'm pretty tired of looking at that mermaid every time I get on my blog.  I've got to post something just to be rid of her!  I've been enjoying taking virtual tours of Christmas homes on other blogs, so I thought I'd give a little virtual tour here at Small-N-Simple Things.    So here goes:

 These are items on my kitchen hutch.  I bleached the bottle brush trees, but they're not NEARLY as cute as the ones my mom made, she glittered and glitzed hers.  The ornaments in the bowl came from goodwill and some of them are mercury glass, I really like them.

 Some of my white dishes and silver.

This is something I saw on Pinterest and re-created because I had everything for it.  A wooden box filled with greenery, lights, wooden logs and pine cones.  It sits in front of the fireplace since it's too warm to build a fire.

 

Here it is lit up at night.

This is a tinsel tree I got at a yard sale for $3.  I'm not sure why I bought it, I just liked how it looked old.

This is our actual Christmas Tree.  The one I bought at a second hand store last year for $10 and flocked myself.  It's looking pretty sad.  My girls really wanted to get a real tree but I told them let's give this one more year and we'll get a real one next year.

Here's the old door with a fresh wreath and the BELIEVE garland I made last year.

And the mantle.   Not too different from last year.

So that is a little of my home dressed up for Christmas.  I'll show more later when there is better light for taking pictures.

A lucrative Halloween

I'm going to try and simplify this as much as possible.
Emily wanted to enter the costume contest at work.  She heard there was a cash prize.  She researched and found the costume she wanted to make.  It was this one:

When she showed this to me I thought, wow that looks like alot of work, good thing she has alot of time to do it.  So she bought a few things here and there.  I bought a few things here and there as I found them.   Fast forward to the night of the 30th.  The costume hasn't even begun.  We had a long night ahead of us.  If we were smart we would have looked up the instructions on how to make this and put it together.  But we're not smart.   So we racked our brains and put together what we had and it just wasn't working.  It looked like the pirate was piggy backing on her.  We worked on it until about 11pm when I couldn't see straight anymore, let alone think straight.  So we slept on it and got an early start.  After some more failed ideas, we finally hit upon a winner.  It took some doing but we did it.  She was going to put it on at work when the contest started so I didn't get a picture of her with it on.  I took these before she left for work:
We found as close to skin color shirt as we could and she wore a sea decorated bra over it.

We made the fin and attached it to this basket decorated with treasure.

 This is the fellow who gave us so much trouble.  Pirates!

We recycled the face of this lady from a couple of years ago

 

 

 This is the destruction that I was left to clean up.

 

 

 Because I'm a dork and forgot to send my camera with her, someone took a picture of her at work and sent it to my phone.  Because I don't have a smartphone I can't put pictures from my phone onto my computer.  This is the best I could do.  She wasn't about to put it back on when she got home.

 It looks like the pirate is leaning over her shoulder. But at least he's not way shorter than her and hiding behind her back.  That was the trouble we had with him.

Anyway.  Long story short.  She tied for first place with a guy that looks exactly like those little green army men.  They each got $200!   AND she won the contest for just her office!  $60
I think we probably had about $20 invested in it.

Yes, I'm getting my commission if that's what you were wondering, because it was the first think I thought of.
I don't know how we got into the business of creative costumes, but I'm getting too old for it!

She's a silent winner

Well, Trunk or Treat is behind me now.  It was fun, but it will be more fun to go next year to just have fun.  Organizing something attended by almost three hundred people is alot of work.  And although I didn't win any of those cute awards in my Sheriff costume, this girl did:

She won best child costume, but she doesn't think she's a child.
There were so many original, creative, cute, funny costumes there.  I'm glad I didn't have the difficult task of judging them.

I didn't get a picture of this guy until we got home.  The picture doesn't do it justice.  I sprayed his hair black (it hasn't been black in years),  he HAD  pointy ears on, the makeup is a slight green, he's wearing a convincing starfleet uniform but he was a little too cranky to smile.  I can't believe he let me dress him up as Spock!  So many people didn't even recognize him.  You know it's a good costume when that happens.

Live long and prosper!

BOOOOoooooo........

This is what I'm doing for the tables for our ward trunk or treat.  Easy.  Inexpensive.

 I'm going to put them on the tables with some candy corn and mini pumpkins.
And look how cute these are!  One of my counselors made these to put on big candy bars for chili, costume & jack-o-lantern awards.

Very Cute.   I want to win one!

Happy almost Halloween

Forgive me, Mr. Brown

I made several pieces of furniture while in high school wood shop.  They were all made out of oak.  Fast foward twenty five years later and I'm now painting over all the oak.  Mr. Brown, my woodshop teacher was the best.  He insisted on doing it right and making it out of the best wood, which is oak.  I don't really think he would like the idea of painting it.  Alot of people are like that, can't imagine painting over wood furniture.  But I'm not one of those people.

So here's my formerly oak china cabinet (no before picture, but you can probably use your imagination).  I removed the upper glass doors a few years back. 

This past week I painted it white, distressed it and applied a glaze.

I don't know why I waited so long to do this.  In fact, that's what the husband said "You should have done that to it in the first place."

I just don't know if it looks good next to the white buffet, now turned TV cabinet.  It isn't distressed and antiqued, it's just white.

What do YOU think?

what I've been painting

I realize it's October and I should be blogging about all things pumpkin.  But I must show you my most recent finds.  My patio has been furniture defficient for a long time.  It bugs me that I don't have a comfortable place to sit out there.  I kind of wanted rocking chairs out there, I imagined that would be really relaxing to rock and look at my backyard.  I looked online and in stores.  Walmart has some wooden rocking chairs for $50 each.  I liked them alot, but just couldn't bite the $100 bullet.
While yard saling with my girls on Saturday, we spotted a wicker rocking chair.  I just about ran the car into a pole to get to it.  And would you believe it was only $5?!  It was natural wicker color with dark green trim.  So what. Paint will fix that.
After a couple of days, I thought I'd check craigslist to see if I could find another one.  And would you believe I did?  Just a short drive and $30 later, it was mine. (I didn't want to talk her down to $5, but I should have)     It was already white but needed repainting.
Then the next day I found some chair cushions at Walmart on clearance for $8.50 each.
Let's do the math, shall we?
Wicker chair: $5
Wicker chair: $30
Cushions: $17
Paint: Free, it was left here by the previous owners
Total= $52

The $30 chair is the bigger of the two.  They aren't the exact same chair, but pretty close.

 

The cushion has to be squeezed in to fit the smaller chair, but it's fine.

I'm pretty pleased and hope they last a long time.

I'll show you what else I've been painting tomorrow.

 

Bookshelve makeover

This is how my built in book shelves USED to look:  Very wood.  Very shiny wood.

This is how my built in bookshelves look NOW:

Just a few days and some paint.  It really wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.  I've been putting it off forever.   But it's really so so so much better.

The items on the shelves are the star of the show now.

I may have gotten a little carried away and put too much stuff on them.

Did you know there's an art to styling bookshelves?  People write articles about it, are obsessed with it, dedicate their lives to it.  Well, maybe not.

It takes alot of skill, of which I have none of.
I opted to leave out some shelves in order to place some bigger scale pieces ( that's a professional term for stuff).  I don't know if I'll leave it like this or not.

*Sigh*  Timeless, classic built ins.