harley, the grinch dog who stole christmas (bows)

i wish i knew what she was thinking...

"maybe i can give mom the ziploc bag for christmas, for her bathtime reading..."

"mom, these bows are SO 1990's." 

"lime green ribbon? really? i think not."

"maybe it will blend in with the grass and no one will notice"

"imma decorate this rock!"

 

Harley

christmas crafting

i love gold! (spray paint.)

on friday night, my friend/photographer/fellow crafter katie lamb came out to the house for some christmas crafting and vino.  we met over at michael's to get our supplies and decide what we were going to do--and somehow, i ended up with 4 projects and a $60 bill, and she came out with one and spent like $10.  hmm.

so, the crafts that i ended up with were:

1) spray painted pears

2) mason jar snow globes

3) gold-painted animals

4) gold canvas

the pears were super duper easy and turned out really cute. i just bought a bag of small bright green pears for about 7 bucks, spread them out on a cardboard tray, and sprayed them. we gave them about an hour to dry, then went and rolled them around and sprayed them again.  i left some (the really small ones) completely green because my christmas decor is bright green, gold, and brown, so i thought it would be cute. once they were all dry, i put them in an antique gold pot.

katie prepping the pears...and harley photobombing

i have to tell ya'll.

i got SO MUCH flak for my camera skills.  probably shouldn't have the date stamp ("totally 1980's kristin") and have terrible aiming, shooting, and use of flash when you are crafting with an amazing photographer. just sayin.  :)

next up, my favorite project.  the mason jar snowglobes.  i had been seeing these on pinterest and thought they were so cute, i just had to do some.  i bought two flats of mason jars from HEB for 10 bucks apiece, then i got some big boxes of ice cream salt for $1.30.  i looked at home depot for the little trees, but the guy there looked at me like i was crazy. so when katie and i went to michael's, i looked again, and we found a bag of assorted size trees for about 20 bucks, but michales had it half off, so i got it for $10. not too bad!

see my december birchbox making an appearance? it was a good one!

ok, so after i had all my materials together, i simply hot glued the trees into the lid of the mason jar, poured some salt into the jar, and then inverted the lid and screwed it back together! some of the jars (the smaller ones) needed less salt, and some needed more, so we just had a bowl out to pour out and add salt as necessary.  i ended up making almost 20 jars, and i plan on giving them away for christmas gifts for the ladies in my life.

 

look how cute!

i set up a little snowy village in my hallway, and changed the chalkboard sign to hang over it. i love how it turned out!

next up was the canvas.  i just grabbed two 10x10 canvases at michaels (they were BOGO) and figured i would decide what to do with the extra one later.  i also got some gold paint and a stencil i thought was cute. 

i simply taped the stencil in the far left corner, painted through it, and then moved it and started again.  it wasnt exactly the neatest job ever, so when i was done, the middle area didnt look so hot. so, i added a thick off-center stripe and called it a day. by this point, we had consumed a glass or so of wine, so forgive my less-than-perfect stencil and painting skills...

here it is all dolled up with my christmas kitchen buffet.  cute, no?

the last project i did was the gold painted animals.  i bought 3 moose-deer-elk like creatures, a wooden base for each, and some awesome gold spray paint.  (the same paint we used on the pears.)  the animals were like 3 bucks apiece and i found them in the toy bin at michaels.  the bases were like .75 cents.  so first, i sprayed the animals gold, doing one side, letting it dry, and then doing the other.

once that was done, i sprayed the wooden base to match them.  then i took the other canvas and painted some off-center stripes on it.  i glued each creature to his wooden base, then glued the bases to the canvas, and voila!  instant christmas art. i liked the animals roaming free off the canvas as well, so i might do it again and leave them just on the wooden bases, but for now, heres how it turned out. 

you can see my other canvas to the left, and then my old window in the back. i wrote in one of the panes on the window, and then left the rest blank to tape christmas cards to.  in the middle is one of the chalkboard printables i did last week.  for that, i printed from here, then cut them out and put them in various frames around my house. here's my favorite:

but i have them all over...





i even have one in the hall bathroom, but i didnt grab a picture of it. 

and these are just me playing with my camera.  :) 

there you have it! more crafts to do!  i think i am about done with crafts for this year.  what have you been up to?

kristin



a post about poor people. or, its almost annie's birthday!

happy 27th birthday anastasia!

tomorrow, december 13th, is my lifelong best friend's 27th birthday.  first of all, holy cow, we are old.  second of all, it makes me somewhat reflective of the years and YEARS that we have been friends. 

we met (we think) when i was about 2.5 and she was a wittle baby.  our parents were some of the first to live on our street, saxon drive.  (both of our parents still live there).  we were two houses down from each other, with the good ol' zenzens in the middle of us, and we would walk to the middle and sing that country song "meet in the middle", i think by diamond rio.  its funny to hear that now because its about a dude and his wife getting over fights. ha.

so anyway, i wanted to honor anastasia's (annie, stais, anniebanannie, etc) birthday by sharing some memories, random thoughts, and fun facts about her. 

• she was born on december 13th, in room 13, at like 11:13am, and there were all these other weird 13 statistics....shes lucky like that :)
• we played SO MANY WEIRD GAMES as kids.  some of the most popular favorites include: poor people, cops and robbers (on bikes), traffic, water wars, let's climb a tree (and strap ourselves in), where are the weird places we can read (top of my closet and the bushes takes this win), where are the weird places we can eat lunch (on top of the washer and dryer), chug apple juice from baby bottles, guess what food i am putting in your mouth as you are blindfolded, teen secrets, bear date night, snail, and i am sure there are many more i cant think of.  but yes, it has been confirmed that we were the weirdest kids ever. 
• she used to be the pickyest eater in the entire world.  now, she will try anything once and actually eats way more types of food than i do. 
• she is russian, like hardcore russian, and has no middle name.  neither do her dad, brother, and mom.  :) 
• shes about to get married in less than 3 months! 
• shes a teacher. 
• we went to the same elementary school, high school, and college, but she went to thornton and i went to labay jr high.  
• she always had the best birthday parties as a kid. some of the best were wizard of oz and beauty pageant.  
• keeping with that theme, shes two years and one month younger than me, and i was always abnormally tall for my age, so all her friends at her birthday parties were like a whole head or more shorter than me. you'd think i would feel weird being the old kid at the party, but nope. i loved it all the same.  :) 
• she says VERY random things, especially when shes tipsy.  "You laugh at me today, I laugh at you tomorrow!"
• we went through a phase (and were way too old to be doing this) where we would only drink out of baby bottles.  weird, i know. i think it was like jr high when we were doing this. 
• as kids, we had big dramatic fights now and again where we wouldnt talk for a bit, but as adults, i think we can count on one finger the number of times one of us has pissed the other one off. i think its because we both say it like it is and dont sugarcoat. ha. 
• she thinks cats, especially cat videos on youtube, are the funniest things ever. i tend to concur. 
• we went to see the final harry potter movie together, and were literally sitting there SOBBING together.  SOBBING. it was somewhat embarassing. i am sure that the two bottles of wine before/during the movie didnt help. 
• her mom, and her whole family, are like my family. they are seriously the nicest, best people you will ever meet. and the quirkiest. hehe. 
• once on a family vacay to the beach, she brought her own food, because she was so picky, and it was these tuna patties things that her mom made.  she had a cooler of them with a note on the top that said "Anastasia's Food".  
• one time she told me this HUGE secret, that she made me swear i wouldnt tell her mom about, and the secret was, verbatim, "I think I wouldn't throw up if I ate salad."  

there are many, many more stories and things that I love about this person.  she is my little bebe (seriously, shes tiny) and she is like a sister to me.  she is quirky, sweet, kind, and thoughtful. and always ready to party.  she is seriously such a fun person to be around. she never gets her feelings hurt about dumb things like most girls (including myself) and she is such a good friend.  she was there for me through LOTS of hard times in my life, and good, like when she was the maid of honor in my wedding. :) I am so proud of you Stais, and cannot wait to be your matron of honor in 3 months!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANASTASIA!

kristin

christmas deco and house projects!

as some of you know, oliver and i have been working like crazy to make our house a home.  when we moved in (almost 2 years ago this january, eek!) all the walls were white except the kitchen, and it just seemed very dingy and not warm/homey.  so we decided to start painting and flipping around furniture to make it more like US.

on black friday, we bought a new living room set from ashley, and it came with a rug, two sofas, a chair, and a coffee table. we are expecting the new stuff to come in on friday (we already got the rug) so in the meantime, we have been painting fools trying to get the walls done before the new furniture comes!

alongside the painting and swapping rooms, i have been in a crafty mood.  i made a few different christmas deco items that turned out pretty cute!  here's a rundown of what we have been working on:


house:
-paint entry way
-paint all arches
-swap dining room and office
-paint new dining room
-paint living room
-paint trim in dining and living rooms
-paint mantle
-hang new curtains in dining and living rooms
-new furniture!

crafts/christmas deco:
-paint dipped/spray painted pinecones
-paint chip garland
-re-paint chalkboard sign and write christmas quote
-tree, mantle, and overall decor up


so as you can see, the only thing left to wait for these rooms is the furniture!!  i am not so great at before and after pics, but i do have an in progress picture of the living room.  here it is while the blue paint is in progress of going up...

this paint is a smokey blue color called silent tide by behr.  it goes on really well and it had great coverage.  in the dining room, we used a hand-mixed color from home depot.  its a martha stuart green/gray but we wanted to use it in behr paint, so it came out a little darker.  i love it! 

here's the dining room all painted up:

as you can see, we left the entry way and the arches taupe. the only green in the dining room is the two walls that do not have arches built into them.  we wanted the arches to serve as a separator between the living and dining rooms, and trying to figure out where the green stopped and the blue began was really tricky. 


PAINT DIPPED PINECONES:
one of the projects i wanted to do for christmas was paint dipped pinecones.  i saw this on pinterest, and it looked super easy and cute.  i bought a bag of pinecones from joanns crafts for $5 and also got some floral wire for like $2.  then i set up a contraption that would allow my pinecones to hang upside down to drip dry. 

once they were all dried, some of the weight of the white paint was opening the bottoms a little bit, so i just put those at the bottom of the bowl.  :)  then i had saved some pinecones aside, so for those i lightly misted them with some gold spray paint.  i put them all together in a pretty red bowl, added a few christmas balls, and voila!  pretty as pie.

for the frames, i just googled chalkboard printables, and found ones that had christmas sayings, then  i put them in old frames i had around. the middle one was small for the frame, so i cut out some craft paper i had left over from my wedding and put that behind it.  i think it turned out pretty cute! 



HOLLY GARLAND:
the next project i did was pinterest insipred, but i dont know that anyone has done this exact same garland.  i have been at home depot pretty much every weekend (painting, ugh) and i had noticed these paint chip samples from behr that are in somewhat of a leaf shape. i thought they were really cute, so i snagged a bunch of those along with some normal square red ones, and got the idea for the holly garland.

my cousins and i punched holes out of the red squares, hot glued the red circles to the leaves, and then hot glued that to a length of ribbon.  it turned out pretty cute!

i saved a few extra little hollies for putting at each set dinner plate for the table.  :)

CHALKBOARD:
my last pinterest inspired project was to overhaul the chalkboard my dad made for me that i used at my wedding.  it was in the lemonade stand, and it had a white frame around it. 

see it at the bottom there?  it also made an appearance at the fondue night i recently had...

but the white was getting stained from all the chalk, and i just didnt think it popped against the dark brown of our laundry room wall. so i took it apart, spray painted the frame, and touched up the chalkboard with some chalkboard spray paint for good measure.  then once that was all dry, i glued it back together and found another pretty christmas saying online.  i printed it out and then freehanded the saying onto the chalk board as best as i could.  its not perfect, but i think its pretty cute for my first time.

so there you have it!  has anyone else been doing any home renovations?  any pinterest projects? 

i will leave you with pictures of our christmas decor....happy holidays!

kristin