Happy Solstice

The earth has tilted back and we are officially on our way towards spring.   But before those seed catalogs start rolling in let's take a quick look at some cozy Christmas touches.  I used to go all out with the Christmas decorating.  In addition to the tree I would put up decorated and lighted garlands and then walked around the house squinting to make sure that each room glowed from every angle.   I spent a day or two adjusting timers so that everything came on within a few minutes of each other. I hauled boxes up and down from the attic and in and out from the front porch until it looked like we were moving.

 Every room of our house still gets a holiday touch, but somewhere along the line I remembered that back in the day we did not have to have decorations covering every surface to know that Christmas was on its way.  All you had to do was close your eyes and breath in the scents of holiday preparation.  

My grandmother prepping a turkey on the wood stove in the kitchen

The only decorations my grandmother put up were a tree, a candelabra in the window next to the door and a Nativity. And those didn't come out until about a week before because of the life span of real trees in a wood heated home.  You could smell cookies and pumpkin pie, greeting cards lined the doorway and Christmas music played quietly from the old radio in the kitchen.  I actually smelled that Christmas smell the other day when I came in from shoveling snow.  Our house still smelled of breakfast pancakes and cinnamon from Glögg and molasses from cookies.  

And snow has a smell.  It really does.

So anyway, here are the decorations that made it up this year.

This is how the table centerpiece turned out.  We enjoyed it every suppertime until the tapers were used up.  Now I've swapped it out for my single pillar candle which takes a lot less time to light and blow out each time and doesn't risk setting off the smoke detector.

The greens dried up and berries faded, but we had it every meal from Thanksgiving through yesterday when I switched it back to this.

On my dresser

Last year I made a tiny evergreen wreath for the sleigh bells.  This year I got out the rings and was going to tackle a tiny rose hip wreath when I decided to go modern with a wreath interpretation instead.  I already have a new idea for next year.

Side Porch entry

My husband even has a lighted village gas station on his desk.

Merry Christmas

May your days be merry and bright...

...and may all your Christmases be white.

Christmas Ornament Repair

 This is the Christmas craft I have been brainstorming this week. I started out by setting aside any older handmade ornaments from past years and hot gluing and trimming and repairing... or just tossing.  I cleaned out old boxes, faded cheapo ornaments with the paint flaking off.  Working with my Christmas stash is part of my fun.  I love to organize and tidy up.

  A few years ago I purchased a set of these Victorian styled push pin ornaments.  I hadn't put them out for a few years and I was looking forward to using them.  These were a popular craft back in the sixties and seventies.  We had some growing up.  You can still buy some of the vintage kits and make your own, but in the past couple of years they seem to be more popular and there are new kits you can get (a bit pricey). Or you can purchase vintage ones.  You can go back to the roots and make your own out of costume jewelry and corsage pins.

^This^ is one that I purchased online.  It looks great on my tree.

There is a really wide range of styles and color schemes to be had.  Some are way too prickly for my taste.  They look like angry porcupines.

There are some that look too gaudy... Although I bet they look nice on a tree.

A couple of winters ago I was at lunch with a friend and we were discussing vintage ornaments.  I described the push pin ornaments.  "Oh I have some of those that a friend gave me.  I'll go get them...."

They were in pretty good shape but my gold ornaments are more of a champagne, and these were really gold yellow.  And there was a lot of satin showing.  Not really my taste.  I made some changes, replacing yellow ricrac hangers with ribbon.  But still...  I didn't love them.

This year as I was going through my decorations I thought "I need to make a decision about those."  Either throw them out or use them.  These were obviously hand made with costume jewelry and things that were on hand and I just couldn't bring myself to toss someone's creative effort.  Not when I knew they could be nice with a little work.  I dug out some old pins and sequins and stuff.  Maybe some ribbon would help.  Or upholstery trim.

I got up on Etsy and ordered an assortment of gimp trim.  Amazon had some good champagne colored pearl headed pins.  I dug around in my Christmas drawer for gold string and other whatnots.  I watched a YouTube video for some constructions tips.

This one didn't need a whole lot of help.  I had a vision.  It just needed to be covered with some texture and color.

That's better.  I may still swap the pearl pins for regular pins which will disappear.

It looks much nicer.  It isn't easy to get the gimp straight all the way around, but there is a whole lot less yellow and a lot more subtle glimmer.  And you don't really notice its flaws when it is on the tree.

Now this one....  this little cherry red one.  I'm sorry but that white ricrac just has to go!

I pulled all of the pins out.  I will break these down and save the components.  A magnetic tray is a huge help, as is the black Velor work surface.

I wasn't as inspired by this one but after searching through internet photos I got some ideas for a starting point.  I went through my sewing supplies for some green headed pins.

It needed the fuzzies singed off with a lighter and I replaced the red beads with some clear ones I had.  I had to improvise on the hanger because I need to get some cap beads,

It looks so different now.  I like it.  It no longer resembles a fake cherry.

Now that I've picked up a few supplies, I need to figure out some improvements for the other two.  Then I may make some more from scratch.  You can buy satin covered foam balls in several sizes and a wide palette of more subtle colors.

I need to get some cap beads to finish off the tops and bottoms.

Some teardrop shaped pearls...

And I can add to my collection...

My tree this year ended up having sort of a raspberry palette.  Not really red.  Not really gold.  I have pink and white and swirls.  This is only the second time I can think of that I have used more than one color of glass balls (or more than two sizes) at a time.

Last year I found a set of "tonal red" ball ornaments which had some shades of pink and then I found this photo and I loved the many sizes and colors and the way the ornaments were hung so they created brushstrokes of color with no set pattern.

  I stuck with the colors that I already had, but I dug through my bins of random ornaments and brought out anything that would coordinate.  And all I used was glass balls and a couple of bead garlands.

So this is what it looks like this year.  Every year it is quite different, and each year I think it is the best I've ever done.  But that is just because it reflects my current inspiration.  Next year it will be different.

Snow, Snow and More Snow

 Just a quick check in to let everyone know we're still here.  This has been our week.  We estimate that we have about three feet of snow up here on the hill since Thanksgiving day.  It is difficult to tell because it all compacts over time.  But we have had no melting in between snowfalls.  Our buildings are positioned in a rather unique way which causes the snow to drift heavily into certain valleys.  

Back in the day, the previous residents avoided this by heavily planting rows of Hemlocks right up against the house.  Most of these trees were gone by the the I arrived twenty plus years ago, but we have continued to remove the mature (and crumbling) trees near the house to the point where it seems the drifting gets worse every year.

And I mean Right Up Against the House!

But with the original roof being so flat, what choice did they have?

Anyway... we have a lot of heavy, dense snow compacted on the roofs.  It is up past our knees in the lawn.  And they keep saying that next week it could warm up to the mid-forties and rain.  That will be a mess.  Roofs can collapse under that weight.  So, we have been keeping up on the shoveling, working on one section each day.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  We have some huge snow piles... and it is still snowing.

I am working on a Christmas craft though.  I will fill you in on that this week.

Winter Wonderland

 The weather is cold and the deer are hungry!  When I got up this morning, it was somewhere between -1 and +4F depending on what source you consulted.  By the time I got bundled up and headed out for my walk the garden thermometer said 8F which is just about nose-hair-freezing temps, but since there was no wind and plenty of sunshine it wasn't half bad.  The roads were bare at least.  The weather was clear last night with a full super moon and everything was covered with hoar frost and diamonds.

The deer are getting desperate already.  This is really early in the season to be so cold and snow covered.  Every Oak tree in the neighborhood has trampled snow beneath it as they rummage for acorns.  They visit our landscape at night and try to dig through my wire cloches but I have them pinned down securely.

They've made a mess of the myrtle ground cover.  I don't mind them eating it but they will not believe it is gone and at this point they start digging deeper and damaging the roots and throwing mulch everywhere.  We put some fencing around to see if we can discourage them.  In my experience the only real way to make them stop at this point is to roll out hardware cloth or woven wire on the ground.

In the shrubby edges of our lawn we can now see how many bird's nests we have.  They each hold a top hat of snow for the first few times and then will dissolve and fall.  I counted about a dozen nests in the immediate area between our lawn and the neighbor's driveway.

The road wreath is snow covered.  Next year I am going to work some battery lights into it.  I put lights on the sled wreath and they are still going strong.

The Neighbor's Barn

Footnote on Past Project: Dried Hydrangea

 Remember back in September when I pruned back my Little Lime Punch Hydrangea bush and set the blooms aside to dry? 

They turned out nicely and held their color well.  They have ended up in our living room because the colors are perfect there.

Today on Garden Answer's YouTube video, Laura is using Hydrangea blooms in one of her outdoor winter containers.  They look fragile but remember, they would still be out on the bush hanging on with the elements.  She touched them up with spray paint to make the color more intense.  I have done this in the past with Sedum blooms using floral paint but she is just using plain ole Rustoleum.  They look beautiful. Yet another use for dried Hydrangea.