When we put away all the Christmas decorations at the end of January we left the kitchen cooking ornaments and the large window snowflakes up. They will probably stay through February.
Valentine decorating began with a heart garland I began crafting when I took out the valentine making materials on one of the days my youngest granddaughter came over in January. I had been wanting to try sewing paper for awhile and I think it turned out pretty well. I love the cherry stamp I bought this year.
Even though I had figured out a way to hang the fir garland in the kitchen this year I was glad to take it down so I decorated the tree again this year.
This year’s heart features a blue bird delivering a valentine. I combined and traced two images I found and then colored in the heart with a marker and the bird with a colored pencil. I scanned it as a photo then printed it on our printer. I had to buy thinner/lighter cardstock so that the printer wouldn’t jam but it’s thick enough to work as a tag/ornament. I wrote S.W.A.K. (sealed with a kiss) on the back and paired it with Hershey kisses.
When I’m crafting my hearts I imagine that the people I give them to will appreciate the hearts as much as the candy but when I gave them to my family on Pizza Friday it was clear that they don’t. I guess until Valentine trees become the rule rather than the exception I can’t really expect people to get excited about Valentine ornaments!
The frogs, turtles, and alligators have always appeared throughout the house. The plastic ones that used to perch on the CD shelves have been decommissioned, as it were, since the CD shelves have become art shelves. Others have found places to bask in.
1. Alligators and a frog on the windowsills in our bedroom. 2. The woven alligator sits atop a sensor above the bedroom door (a nod to all the “guys” that used to perch above door frames. 3. This guy (a painted and altered seed pod) who used to be on one of the black boxes in our bedroom is in the living room now atop the first CD cabinet. 4. The guitar playing guy also moved from a black box to join the wooden alligator with a broken jaw on top of the living room bookcase. 5. Two carved alligators lying on top of the “new” living room bookshelves (they used to be in the workroom) 6. Transplants from the old CD shelves sit on the “new” CD shelf (it used to be the paperback bookshelf). 7. The alligators with fishes in their mouths from the old CD shelves on the “new” living room bookshelves. 8. Two frogs and a turtle from the CD shelves and the glass turtle that used to be in our bathroom on the second CD cabinet. 9. Two Valentine frogs and a turtle lamp from friend Susan still live on a bedroom dresser.
One of my favorite things about having collections is receiving items for the collections from friends and family.
The red partridge and a pear tree trivet our youngest daughter gave us found an immediate temporary home on the Christmas decorated sideboard.
My oldest daughter found a merman to join all the mermaids.
And one of our nieces found a piece to identify the collection.
I think that hanging it above the door like this gives it the effect of a label in a cabinet of curiosities.
When my husband’s brother and his wife visited in the Spring he asked how many suns he had contributed to the sun collection. The answer was most of them. And when they came at Christmas they brought us another one – this carved yellow one – as a house warming present.
We’re still contemplating adding the more colorful ones that hung in the bathroom at our old condo. While we’re not quite ready to hang them, I think with this new addition the wall is beginning to look like it needs them.
Another present that was fun to incorporate was this potholder that the aforementioned niece made.
She made them for everyone out of different but similar fabric and after we opened them it was funny to hear the “Oh I get it, POTholders!” exclamations travel around the room.
I love Christmas decorating since I get to reconnect with our Christmas collections and traditions. One of my recent traditions is to go on internet blog hops and see all the homes decorated and photographed by professional bloggers. But one of my favorite blog hops is Jennifer Rizzo’s Linky Party which follows her wonderful Holiday Housewalk and often features blogs more like mine with its eclectic decorating and photos taken with a phone. With just a desire to share my home with others, and no hope of being selected for next year’s blog hop (one of the reasons people join the linky party), I am linking to Jennifer Rizzo’s Linky Party.
We started our Christmas decorating this year by finding a new place for the Advent Calendar. The space between the china cabinet and the bench is usually empty so we were able to use command hooks to hang the Advent Calendar, the cross stitch hanging, and the stockings. So much easier than in our old condo where we replaced the regular pictures.
We moved the small bookcase that is usually on the other side of the room where the Christmas tree will go and filled it with small villages.
The one on the top is from Germany and belonged to my mother. The animals from that village are on the middle of the next shelf (they wouldn’t stand up in the “snow”) flanked by some alpine cottages from The Christmas Tree Shop.
Cats are not kind to trains that move around under a tree so what is left of the train I bought to go under the tree when we lived in Denver sits on the third shelf along with its village, from my husband’s mother’s ceramic store, that I painted many years ago. The bottom shelf, available for grandchild play, holds a wooden village and a wooden nativity set.
The Advent Calendar used to hold presents for our daughters wrapped in green and red tissue paper. They get those packages delivered to their homes now and we tie red bows on the calendar. We take turns removing a ribbon and tying the bow around one of the small pieces that adorn our shelves year round. Then the other one has to find it – easy at first but it gets harder as the month goes on to remember what did and didn’t have ribbons. One of the first ribbons appeared on the neck of the gourd crane below. The wooden bird facing him and one of the alligators on the shelf above also have bows now.
The door of the 24th on the paper German Advent Calendars we had when I was a child always opened to reveal a Nativity. We continue that tradition so we have a lot of Nativities. Some hang on the tree and this year the shelf ones are displayed on the top of the China cabinet along with a few larger ones.
We are always excited to add to our collections. This year we found a copper pan ornament at World Market for our kitchen Christmas collection that hangs under our cabinets and numbers over thirty pieces now.
Some of other collections also end up in the same places each year including the small Santa and Snowpeople collections that are always displayed on the speakers.
And some collections get displayed differently each year. This year most of the gnomes congregated together on one of the CD cases (the one with all the Christmas music!) I love the gnome printable from the Clean and Scentsible blog which I also printed out for some gnome collecting friends.
https://www.cleanandscentsible.com/gnome-free-christmas-printable/
Our new sideboard is a great place to display many of our reindeer and the Saint Lucia I created from an angel tree topper many years ago.
In 1990 my sister in law began making “one block quilts” as Christmas ornaments for gifts for family and a few friends. She makes around 25 each year! We hang the smaller ones from the first few years on our tree and we hang the rest together. As this collection keeps growing we keep finding new places to display them.
One of my favorite Christmas traditions is making something new for our windows. Our large windows called out for large snowflakes this year.
Each snowflake is made up of six pieces made with the Martha Stewart “Party Crafting Template”. I purchased it several years ago and used it that year to make make many ornaments with double sided foil paper. Hung separately each one twists beautifully. Attached together they make these large snowflakes.
We put our German Christmas Market mugs on the ledge of the dining room section of windows.
The last one on the right is from this year’s Chicago Christmas Market. The ones on the left (below) are from the year I went on a Christmas Market Tour in Germany.
Our old condo had a kitchen window above the sink and we hung a garland above it. I usually hung crafted ornaments on the garland that I gave to people who visited throughout the season. I thought we couldn’t continue this tradition until I was reading a blog that mentioned someone who just pretended at Christmas that they had a window above their sink. Aha!
I was inspired by a blog or pin I can’t find again to make the patchwork wood slice ornaments and the skis also come from the Clean and Scentsible blog.
https://www.cleanandscentsible.com/popsicle-stick-skis-christmas-ornaments/
We haven’t put up our Christmas tree yet as we usually do that around the 15th but we did put up our Children’s Book and Movie Characters tree in our workroom. I can’t get a good photo of the whole tree. The quote attributed to Albert Einstein on the top of the fairy whose head didn’t make it into the photo says, “If you want your children to be bright, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be brilliant, read them even more fairy tales.”
In addition to Pippi, Madeline, and Anna and Elsa pictured here, the tree contains many more ornaments including the Wizard of Oz characters from both the movie and book versions. This year since I took my grandchildren to see Shrek the Musical, I wanted to find a Shrek ornament. I was happy to find a Shrek figure to stand underneath with Peter Pan and Captain Hook, Wonder Woman, three princesses and Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.
When we moved here there wasn’t room for all the mermaids we had hanging in our upstairs bathroom so I thought the left over ones deserved a tree this year.
Now I can’t wait to decorate our live tree with all its collections!
In our workroom window in Northampton we had a small collection of fairies. Since no place seemed right for them here, I decided to divide them up by seasons. Here are the two that landed on the Fall tree.
The first one, with her sunflower dress and missing wing fabric that basically dissolved, was a parting gift from my co-workers at Child Care Focus. The second one was a pleasant surprise when I started unwrapping the fairies. I didn’t remember him at all so I don’t remember where I got him. Other fairies will show up on the Christmas tree and the Spring tree .
Several years ago at a Deerfield craft fair I bought an ornament with an old fashioned slightly weird photograph which inspired this year’s treats. I searched online for vintage creepy photographs and found one of two girls with a ghostly third girl between them. I was excited to find chocolate ghosts and skeletons at World Market since I imagine that the recipients prefer chocolate ghosts to marshmallow ghosts. Happy Halloween!
It was windy on Saturday night so Sunday was a good day to look for a fallen branch along the lakefront bike trail.
We hung it in the living room window and while we couldn’t fit everything on it, we could add a beautiful glass pomegranate with seeds I don’t even remember buying and the new wooden leaf I got from Target a few weeks ago.
While some of the Day of the Dead ornaments are hanging on the branch due to size and fragility, others are on the dining room Halloween trees I put up at the beginning of October.
A few new ornaments are hanging on these as well. We bought the new pipe cleaner pumpkin man and the pumpkin cupcake ornament at the Evanston sidewalk sales. The witch’s broom was tied to the top of a bar of soap with an image of a witch driving a car. When I saw it at Home Goods I thought it would be perfect for one of the trees and was a free bonus since we also got a bar of soap!
We bought this Eeek ornament when we went to Columbia, Missouri for a music festival in September.
The weirdest thing about our new Chicago condo is that the two bathrooms are almost exactly the same. The only difference is that the one off the bedroom has a closet and is a little bigger. Otherwise they were exactly the same – same green tiles on the floor, same glass door tub enclosure and the same white tiles with a green diamond border, same small white sink cabinet, same green counter top, same large medicine chest, same “Hollywood make up lights”, and the same porcelain toilet paper holders, hooks, and towel bars (both of which had obviously fallen down at least once and broken a bit since they were hung too close to the toilet and people couldn’t help using them as if they were handicap bars).
The green worked well as a mermaid bathroom but wouldn’t work as the base for a sun bathroom so while most of the mermaids went to the bedroom bathroom, a few ended up in the living room bathroom. “It’s kind of “Mermaid Lite” in here,” my sister commented.
I really didn’t want the two bathrooms to be exactly the same, though so I was glad when the wall with the medicine chest had to come down for some plumbing work. I mean, who needs a medicine chest in their guest bathroom anyway? We hung the mirror from our old guest bathroom which is primarily blue and green above the sink and decided that this bathroom’s colors would be blue and green. I was pleased that the diamond tiles of the mirror went nicely with the diamond tiles in the shower. And I ordered some knobs for the cabinet that were blue and green and kind of a diamond shape. Then I looked at those empty walls! I thought of the pottery bird picture that had hung in our kitchen but had no place here in Chicago. I also placed a small glass box with a bird on the top on the glass shelf we had hung under the mirror. Then I put a new cast iron feather I purchased at a sidewalk sale this summer on top of the toilet.
I then announced that three bird things were enough and that this wasn’t going to become a bird bathroom – that there was no need for the walls to be filled with birds. But that one bird hanging on one side of the door did look kind of lonely so when we went to an arts festival and saw another similar sized bird of course we bought him for the other wall. But we don’t need to fill all these walls with birds, I told myself again.
In his essay on his show “Chicago We Own It” at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art”, William Swislow writes that “Horror Vacui” a term that means fear of empty spaces is a defining characteristic of many Chicago collectors. Aha! Now I just need to know the word for what makes me want to put all the bird things together. For even after declaring “no more birds in the bathroom”, I remembered that my sister had given me a green and blue plate with a bird image which obviously belongs with the others.
As I mentioned in a footnote to the last post Bruce Handy, author of “Wild Things” finds Anne Shirley “detestable”. He says he tried to read “Anne of Green Gables” but the deal breaker was when Anne named a geranium. As evidence for his inability to continue he quotes Anne in a paragraph that begins, “How do you know but that it hurts a geranium’s feelings just to be called geranium and nothing else?” Little does he know that this paragraph could be a litmus test for determining if a reader is of the “race that knows Joseph” – one of Anne’s kindred spirits. (1)
I have read and reread the five Anne books that belonged to my mother and was truly baffled at his dislike until my friend Susan explained that there are some books you have to read for the first time at a certain (young) age to appreciate them.
This made me remember my “Pride and Prejudice” experience. I have read so many books I’ve enjoyed that are inspired by, based on, or include characters who positively worship Jane Austen. Since I had never read her I thought I should and while I did finish “Pride and Prejudice” I really didn’t enjoy it and thought Mr. Darcy who others apparently find the ideal mate as detestable as Bruce Handy found Anne.
And in Bruce Handy’s defense I must add another thought. My mother also had a copy of “Rilla of Ingleside” which I had read once and decided to reread recently rather than rereading the Anne books. When I was perplexed by something in the book, I googled it and found to my surprise that “Rilla of Ingleside” is sometimes referred to as the eighth Anne book and that there are two more: “Anne of Ingleside” (the sixth) and “Rainbow Valley” (the seventh). So I found a used copy of one and downloaded the other onto my Kindle and I must admit I never would have been able to finish them if I wasn’t already a “member of the Anne cult”.
(1) As long as I’m writing about Bruce Handy, I’ll include another footnote. During my latest foray into Anne world I wondered about the derivation of the phrase “the race that knows Joseph”. Googling it only gives results related to the Anne books and no definitive answer to the source of the phrase.
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of
The cow jumping over the moon
According to Bruce Handy in a (mostly) excellent book “Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult” to Margaret Wise Brown, “the very act of cataloguing a room held private meaning” as she once told a friend that she would combat depression every morning by looking around her apartment and making a note of the various things that gave her pleasure.
As any reader of this blog subtitled “collecting, observing, and cataloguing my world” will note, I most certainly do the same thing and while I hadn’t consciously realized it was to “combat depression” that does make sense.
Bruce Handy doesn’t directly credit the source of this fact as that isn’t how he uses footnotes. (1) But since I’ve read the excellent biography “Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon” by Leonard S. Marcus and don’t remember it, I think it must have come from the newer biography, “In the Great Green Room: the Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown” by Amy Gary. I hadn’t heard of this newer biography but can’t wait to read it.
(1) Bruce Handy uses footnotes to add information as he does on page 206 to explain why he hasn’t included “Anne of Green Gables” in his chapter “Going on Seventeen (Or Not)” and calls Anne a “sunny, cheerful, detestable orphan”.
