Advent Time Again

… and this year I finally have the advent wreath I’ve been wanting.

Holiday Home Tour – Have a Treat

If the sugarplum fairy ever visits this is where she’ll be hanging out, I’m sure. The dining room is definitely the land of sweets.

Holiday Home – Grab a Seat

Today I’ll be showing you our living room. This is our fancy room so it has the fancy tree. That means it’s filled with mostly glass ornaments and other ornaments I don’t want to find broken/ruined. We have another tree in the family room that is much more homespun looking. But in the living room I try to keep it elegant.

Holiday Home Tour – Come On In

Hello and welcome to the urchin home. So glad you guys stopped by to see us. I decorate the porch with my childhood sled, a grapevine wreath, a vintage red lawn chair, a lot of pinecones, and some rusty jingle bells. The large pinecones are from sugar pines and the smaller pinecones are the cinnamon scented ones. Their scent would be way too much in the house but on the porch it’s rather nice. The bells are oversized and rusty.

I try to keep the entryway fairly simple when I decorate for the holidays. We have one cabinet in there and I don’t like the top of it to be cluttered with decorations, I do enough cluttering of it daily with my keys and mail. The little pillow hangs from a front closet doorknob and says “star bright… Christmas light” and has the year Papa and I were married on it. The snowman sits at the bottom of the stairs right next to the living room which is where we’re headed tomorrow.

Please be sure to drop by these friends who will also be showing off their holiday homes this week:

Daisy

Eren

Grace

Heather

Julia

Melody

Melissa

If you’d like to join the tour just post some photos to your blog or flickr and let me know so I can add you to the list.

Holiday Home Tour

I was recently talking with Grace about holiday decorating and I told her I would take a photo of a little vignette I always do on our front porch for her to see. It got me thinking about holiday homes and how much inspiration can come from seeing what other people do. Now don’t get me wrong, the images in magazines are really magical at this time of year but they often seem unattainable too. I certainly don’t have the budget or skills to create one of those kind of rooms. And honestly, I don’t want my home to feel like a magazine, especially at this home-y, cozy time of year. So this week I’ll be giving a little holiday home tour of the urchin house and I’m hoping you might want to join in. I’ll be posting every day but you can post as little or as much as you like. Let me know and I’ll make a list so we can all be inspired by each other’s holiday homes.

Yellow

Did you know about yellow week?

Flight of the Tooth Fairy

It’s actually been almost a month since Katie came to me and said Mama, something happened to my tooth. The dentist told us last Spring that her bottom two teeth were loose but we hadn’t noticed any looseness until just the day before it came out. She was trying to open a lid with her teeth — not something we encourage, for sure — and out it came. Luckily, I was prepared with this:

A fairy portal by the absolutely wonderful Kim — seriously I cannot tell you how great she is. We did not want our fairy portals — you know I had to get one for Tristan too for when the time comes — to be mounted next to the baseboard like Kim’s regular doors. Instead we wanted to mount them higher on the wall — away from little hands. Fairies fly, right? So that is why Kim made us a circular door. Katie was thrilled when she discovered it in the morning. We told her she must be pretty special to have the tooth fairy build a door into her room. Now she’s just trying to figure out how to get the next tooth out.

Wool as Home Dec

Thanks for indulging me with Autumn Is… I have a few more posts to get to before we start heading into Winter. Now though, let’s talk yarn and sticks. The temps here took quite a dip at the end of last week and it is feeling very brisk around here. This morning we even had a real frost. Time to start thinking in wool. And what better way to feed the wool-obsessed brain than with a bowl of it on the coffee table.

Some people pay for those little orbs made of raffia and sticks to display in a bowl. Me, I just go diving in my stash. It must be working because I have been getting some knitting done. That little bit you can see there next to the bowl is an almost complete first sock for a friend. Not shown is a the first completed mitt of a pair for someone else. Don’t worry ladies, I’m rotating these two projects so I show no favoritism. Hopefully those two will have warm feet and hands, respectively, by election day.

This hat is also 1 of 2 as a thank you for another friend who generously sent me a big box of goodies. Denise and her crew are devoted fans of LSSU hockey so the hat is in that team’s colors. Seen here, modeled by Tristan, I want to see how it fits her boys to see if I need to make the next one bigger or smaller. The pattern is thorpe and the yarn is malabrigo. The next one might be yellow with blue on the edges, what do we think about that?

Happy Weekend

I’m feeling a bit like doing what that urchin up there in the photo is doing but there is no rest for the weary, as they say. Today I’m finishing up a big gift for a big shindig tomorrow to celebrate my grandmother’s 75th birthday. I’ll show you on Monday. I’ve also got more knitted headwear to share. Have a great weekend everyone.

What’s With the Weather?

Last evening we were driving home from my parents’ house and had to turn around three separate times because the roads were flooded and blocked by all manner of emergency vehicles. Two other times we only got through a flooded road because we drive a tank that is rated to ford streams up to a depth of 20″ without a snorkel — not my car in that photo. So yeah, it was kind of an intense end to a lovely Mother’s Day.

Today the rain continued and the temperatures reached a high of 45 degrees. Tristan wore his wool sweater he got for Christmas and Katie asked for a fire late this afternoon. May 12, that is the date, right?