I finally finished it! Just in time to take it down in 48 hours!
Instructions after the jump! Continue reading Heart garland: how-to
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I’m not one of those Christmas People who have twelve boxes of decorations in their attic and start pulling them out the second the last bite of Thanksgiving turkey has been eaten, but lately I have been missing the Christmas decorations. We took them down a little earlier than I would have liked — it just worked out that way. So I decided I would make some Valentine’s Day decorations! Usually I would have ideas like this three days before the holiday, but this year I had plenty of time. Maybe. I’m still working on the second project and we’ll see if I finish that one before the 14th, but I can share the first one tonight!
I made enough for all of the shutters on the main floor. If you don’t have plantation shutters or another way to hang them in your windows, they would be cute hanging from doorknobs. Follow the jump if you want to see how to make them! Continue reading Hearts on a string: how-to Yesterday while I was at work I was surprised to receive a call from our security company about a motion detector in our house being set off. Getting the alarm system set up was one of the first things we did when we bought the house in the summer of 2008, and we have never had a false alarm. The motion detector gets set whenever we are out or sleeping, and supposedly it takes an animal of at least 40 lbs to set off the kind we have. I was 80% sure that Sweet Pea had finally figured out a way to trigger it, but I had the dispatcher send the police to drive by anyway.  Does this look like the face of shenanigans? The dispatcher was supposed to call me back and let me know whether the police had seen anything. One hour, two hours — we have had slow police responses in the past, and I was sure that our burglar alarm had been lost at the bottom of the priority list. I thought of the off chance that someone had broken in and I imagined Sweet Pea wandering the neighborhood, and not being able to find her as the sun set and the temperature plummeted. I couldn’t take it anymore; I had to go home. I crept the car past the house a couple times, looking for anything out of place, and saw nothing but a tag from the police, who had indeed responded within 10-15 minutes of the alarm. Opened the garage, everything appeared to be there. I relaxed a little and I was dying to know what that cat had knocked over to set off the alarm. I came inside, stood and looked around carefully, and saw…nothing. Nothing out of place, nothing smashed to pieces. So it looks like it was just a malfunction. At least, I hope it was — we only get so many free false alarms per year, and Sweet Pea is only two, so she has plenty of mayhem-causing years ahead of her. The security company will be out very soon to swap out our sensor and batteries, and hopefully I won’t get any more calls like I got yesterday. On the other hand, if she did somehow trigger the alarm, the odds are good that she will do it again, because she does not learn:
Sometimes I get the impression that maybe she’s not very smart.
Either way, only she knows what really happened yesterday! We’ve had a pretty relaxing weekend around here. We slept late, stuffed ourselves silly (as usual), and did some holiday shopping. Sometimes I like to take a lazy weekend day as an at-home spa day. I did that Saturday since we weren’t planning to leave the house, and I decided to have a little fun with my nail polish:
I liked it better in my head and at first I thought I’d be changing it before the weekend was over, but it’s growing on me. Reminds me a little of peacock feathers. Did my toes, too:
For the nail polish fiends, that’s two coats of Revlon in ‘Minted’ and one of Nicole by OPI in ‘Too Rich for You.’ Sweet Pea had a busy weekend of galloping around the living room, chasing after toys, attacking my feet, and singing outside the bedroom door. She sat on my lap for a movie Saturday night, which is a positive step in her snuggle training. She is taking a well-earned rest from all that productivity:
Just looking at that picture is making me sleepy. Do your pets have that effect on you, too? Last weekend while Mark was at work, I turned on the holiday music channel and pulled out the decorations. Sweet Pea really seems to enjoy sprawling out under the tree:
I may or may not have had to teach her some things I may regret in order to get some of the pictures.
And that may or may not be the reason our fake tree has dropped a number of fake needles on the floor.
But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to get the shot. :)
The polar bear is buried somewhere in a box of carefully (and identically) wrapped fragile items, but this is the little donkey I told you about last week. He hangs out in the china cabinet (where else?) with some beautiful, cobalt Hungarian lead crystal glasses that used to belong to my grandmother and some amazing hand-painted table service treasures that Mark’s parents have brought us from Italy and Vietnam. I hope to one day be as well traveled as my kitchenware! I spent the weekend cooking everything that can be frozen ahead of Thanksgiving. I’d tell you what that is, but my guests read my blog and I’d like to have some surprises! Now dinner is in the oven and I’m too tired to make my lunches for the week, but I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving — even if it doesn’t have its own candy like a proper holiday should. …and something in my favorite blue:
Now that we have been in this house for over two years, we are finally getting our bedroom set up as something other than box storage. I want to share the finished room here, but it’s not finished. It’s starting to come together nicely, however, so I thought I’d share a few of the elements that make it home. We decided on dark furniture, and I wanted white lamps on the bedside tables. I wanted a single white decorative object next to my lamp, and I spent an afternoon scouring antique shops for the right one. I found tons of treasures, but not the right white object. Then I saw something in a display case that made me realize I’d had my object at home all along. On my bedside table (OMG I have a bedside table! We had overturned moving boxes for two years):
The lamp is new, but the pelican is over 50 years old. My mom got it as a birthday present from a friend when she was five or six and it’s part of a set — pelican, donkey, and polar bear. I have no idea why those things should go together, but I have them all. The pelican and the donkey have a little strip of fur glued to them, but the pelican’s has seen better days. I say it adds to his charm. Regardless, I’m thrilled to have ended up using an antique from my family rather than from some stranger’s.
His tag reads: PETE, FLUFFY PELICAN — TAKE FROM ME, I’VE A MOUTHFULL OF ADVICE Being who I am, you know there have to be some creepy crawlies someplace in the room:
The spider was invited for Halloween, but I believe he’s won year-round status on Mark’s bedside table. I wonder if I could find a tiny Santa hat. Oh, and the object in the blue box? Something I have wanted for years and finally have a place for:
I have mentioned that I don’t sew. I would like to be a person who can sew, and I think I may try again eventually, but right now I have 100 other hobbies that I already know I like and don’t have time/space for. So not yet. But I do own clothes that other people made, and occasionally the need for mending arises. I can do some of this, so I keep some basic supplies. Oh, and every spare button, sequin or loop of thread that has ever come with a garment:
That mess is how you know I’m not someone who sews. That thing, which originally contained some kind of bath gift set, was packed to the gills. But, lo! I found myself with a freebie compartmented case that I had no real use for:
It’s meant for traveling with cosmetics, but in my view it is suboptimal for that purpose. So I repurposed it:
The buttons that I couldn’t identify (or whose garments I no longer own) got sorted by color, and the rest stayed in their original bags. Now I might actually mend things! But the truth is that I usually stain garments before they get to that point. How did you think I ended up with so many buttons? I am a hoarder. Of jewelry. Especially since I discovered Harwin Street. Sure, it was a great idea to buy a million-billion gold bangles — they were cheap and I use them all the time! But the problem is that now I have a million-billion gold bangles, along with all the other wonderful things I’ve been amassing, and it all has to go somewhere when it’s not on my body. Most of it collects on top of the built-in dresser in the closet. Some of it has migrated to the top drawer. The jewelry tree that my sister gave me is wishing lightning would strike it and put it out of its overburdened misery.
Recently I saw this and remembered that I have a similar drawer unit that my mother bought for me long ago! It’s been sitting on the top shelf in the guest closet since we moved here two years ago. It was full of old jewelry and junk like receipts and movie stubs from 2000:
And concert tickets from even longer ago:
I shredded the old receipts, sorted the jewelry as ‘donate’ or ‘keep for parts,’ and squirreled away the few things I wasn’t ready to part with (like an enormous stack of concert tickets, for reasons I cannot explain). Then I got to organizing the things I do use. I have a bunch of little satin pouches that I bought on Harwin Street for $1 each, and some cute paper tags that I bought from the scrapbooking section of Michael’s when I was putting together gift bags for my wedding. I sorted categories like silver pendants into individual bags and tagged them with descriptions:
A perfect fit! I need to pick up more bags and tags. Those tags are the only hope I have of not completely forgetting what’s in there once it is all tucked out of sight. So here are the results (the bags on the front left corner carry each day’s jewelry selection to the gym):
I set a few of the most unwieldy bracelets and rings on top of the little chest, where I can see and be inspired by them:
I’m very good at organizing, but I’m terrible at maintaining organization, so hopefully this will make it easier. I still need a better solution for the necklaces, but this will do for now. The Irish diplomats of the US, Southerners often have a nice way of saying things — like ‘bless your heart’ when they’d rather give you the finger. Or ‘palmetto bug‘ when they mean ‘the most enormous cockroach you’ll see outside of a zoo.’ Giant roaches are a fact of life down here in the subtropics. Mark keeps our house extremely clean (no small feat with me as his roommate), but we still see them once or twice a year. A couple nights ago Sweet Pea found one, and it was clearly the highlight of her life so far. It was either too dumb or too young to fly, so I let her chase it around until it became obvious that she had no idea what to do with the thing as it flailed on its back. I caught it under a glass where she eagerly inspected it until I decided it had been tortured enough, at which point I carried it downstairs and flung it over the fence into the vacant lot.
Yes, I know, it’s really not that large, but trust me — when they surprise you, they appear about five times their actual size! Click below for a video of Sweet Pea vs. the roach:
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