Buttons

Posted on December 30, 2006 by Barbara Harper

Some weeks ago I saw the cutest little soft trees at The Sparrow’s Nest (wonderful blog with many homemaking posts). I haven’t made them yet (still want to!) From her link I found the pattern for the trees at little bird’s handmade. While there I looked around (lovely site! I highly recommend it if you want to get inspired about crafting!) and discovered these adorable button wreaths here and here. I have always loved buttons — I don’t know what it is about them — and this looked so cute and easy. But I had so much so do for Christmas, then some other responsibilities this past week, and last night was the first chance I got to attempt them.

I couldn’t really get an idea of the scale for them from the pictures. I googled “button wreath” and found some other people had made them about 3 1/2 inches high. I began to look through my button collection and saw all the heart-shaped ones (one of my other loves is heart-shaped things), and thought — Hey! Maybe I could make a heart-shaped one! I Googled “heart shape” to find a pattern (my free-hand stuff, even simple shapes, is way wobbly) and found one the size and shape I wanted — I wanted this one to be a little bigger — and printed it off on card stock. The tricky part was making the heart-shaped hole in the middle for a wreath, but between measuring, my husband scanning and printing a smaller size of the heart shape, and eye-balling it, I finally got an acceptable shape. I cut the heart-shaped pattern out of cardboard. Then I decided I wanted to do a small ornament with a heart shape, but not with the whole in the middle. I didn’t think that would need to be as heavy as the cardboard, so I got one of those thin pieces of cardboard from the back of a package of computer stationery (I knew I had been saving those for a good reason! 🙂 ) for it.

Basically you just glue buttons on to the shape. I started with flat, plain buttons and added the shaped and decorative ones on top as I filled in spaces. I used a small hot glue gun. I imagine craft glue or tacky glue would work, but would take longer to dry and work with. I glued a ribbon for hanging it on the back, then backed them both with white felt (I read that some other used decorative paper for backing).

I was so pleased with the results!! Here is the ornament:

I realized afterward that the little Christmas tree is a charm rather than a button, but that’s ok. 🙂

Here is the wreath:

I just love the vintage look, even though none of the buttons are vintage. Some of them I’ve collected over the years; many were from little bags of them that Michael’s used to sell (I don’t know if they still do — I am going to check!!)

The ornament is about 3 1/2 inches; the wreath is 6 inches. The larger wreath does take up a lot more buttons, so I’d go with a small one unless you just have a lot of buttons you need to use up. 🙂

I haven’t done much of anything crafty for a long time, and I was delighted to get back into it with these projects. I want to make some more next year for other people. I’ve been enjoying looking at various crafting blogs over the last several weeks and excited about doing some new projects this year! 🙂

By the way, I’ve found all kinds of variations on the little soft trees I mentioned at first. My favorites are the ones at The Sparrow’s Nest, little birds handmade, turkey feathers, and Mississippi Girl, but there are many variations — there are some creative people out there! There is even a Flickr category for them!

Saturday Photo Scavenger Hunt: New

Posted on December 30, 2006 by Barbara Harper

This is the newest addition to my Boyd’s Bear figurine collection. I love it because 1) it’s Boyd’s; 2) it’s so cute; and 3) my husband gave it to me for Christmas. But I especially love this one because it shows the couple sitting on a log, and we got engaged while sitting on a log in a park, and he thought of that when he got this for me. Isn’t he sweet? ♥

To find out more about the Saturday Photo Scavenger Hunt, go here.

Nativity

Posted on December 25, 2006 by Barbara Harper

Iris asked fellow bloggers to post pictures of their Nativity sets. We don’t have a full-fledged set, but I love this little musical one that my mom gave me several years ago.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. Luke 2:11

Infant holy, Infant lowly, for His bed a cattle stall;
Oxen lowing, little knowing, Christ the Babe is Lord of all.
Swift are winging angels singing, noels ringing, tidings bringing:
Christ the Babe is Lord of all.
Christ the Babe is Lord of all.

Flocks were sleeping, shepherds keeping vigil till the morning new
Saw the glory, heard the story, tidings of a Gospel true.
Thus rejoicing, free from sorrow, praises voicing, greet the morrow:
Christ the Babe was born for you.
Christ the Babe was born for you.

— Traditional Polish Carol

Christmas Tour of Homes

Posted on December 15, 2006 by Barbara Harper

BooMama is sponsoring a Christmas tour of homes so we can show each other around our places all decked out for the holidays. What a lovely idea! I’m looking forward to going visiting!

We have this friendly fellow right by out front steps.

This is on our front door.

These are on our side doors.

We don’t have much else in the way of outside decorations. I’d love to, but I can’t physically hang the lights, Jim hasn’t had time to, and the boys don’t really know how. A lot of homes around here have wreaths on all the front windows, and I have wanted to do that for some time, but usually right in the midst of the season there’s just no time, and afterward it is hard to find inexpensive wreaths. If I don’t get it done this year, maybe next year I will when the first Christmas things come out in the fall, before things get really busy with the holidays.

Welcome to the living room!

I’d like to tell you about a few special things in here. I showed some of our special tree ornaments in an earlier post, so we’ll go on to the decorations on the piano.

I usually have a few branches of greenery there, but just realized I hadn’t done that yet. I made the verse there for a calligraphy class years ago, but haven’t done much with calligraphy since, I’m afraid. I’d probably have to learn it all over again.

My mom gave me this several years ago. I has a button in the back that you can push to hear Christmas music and watch the lights flash. The boys have loved this.

This is something else my mom sent: a Nativity music figurine.

This is one of my most special treasures, also from my mom. I collect Boyd’s Bear figurines, and somewhere she found this Christmas tree with little miniature scenes all though it.

Here are a couple of close-ups:

On the other end table are these snowpeople.

I got the three snowboys because they reminded me of my three sons. 🙂 Then the boys got each of the bigger snowmen in a crane game. So we put them all together as our family representatives. 🙂 It just occurred to me that I should get a little feminine hat for one of the bigger ones to represent me. 🙂

I think Jesse bought these for me one year:

So that little area looks like this:

As you can tell, I have pastel colors and a lot of pink in my home. That’s a bit of a dilemma at Christmas with all the reds: some of my ornaments and things that were given to me have red in them. In recent years I’ve leaned toward the maroonish bluer reds and dark pinks that would go better with the rest of the decor. But, as I said in the earlier posts about ornaments, I want this all to be family-friendly more than “designer” decorating, so for the most part I just don’t worry about it. However, I was delighted to find this little snowman in my living room colors:

Here are the last couple of things in the living room:

This is something else my mom sent when the boys were little. They don’t do much with it now, but they used to love moving the little mouse from pocket to pocket through December.

I was excited to find this “Noel” sign in pinks and blues, and it works well at the window over the kitchen sink:

One of my favorite decorations is this little mouse. If you light the candle in the back it looks like a fire in the fireplace.

Here is the fireplace in the family room with the stockings. I made the plaid ones after we were first married and a dear friend knit the others for each of the boys as a baby gift after they were born. The rest of this room is in blue, tan, and off-white, so the red doesn’t clash with pinks in here. 🙂

I made these ages ago and they are getting worn and falling apart a little, but the boys love these.

Lastly is this little guy in a corner of the family room by the door:

Thanks so much for stopping by! Come visit any time. 🙂 I’m looking forward to visiting the rest of the homes linked to BooMama’s Christmas tour, but it may take me a while to get around.

Christmas Tree Treasures

Posted on December 11, 2006 by Barbara Harper

Morning Glory is hosting a time for us to share special Christmas tree ornaments and any stories behind them. We just got our tree up Saturday, and I am just getting the pictures up today.

I don’t know if any other moms struggled with this, but early on I had to make a decision between whether I’d have a “designer” tree with everything to my tastes and “just so,” or whether to have a tree the whole family could participate in. Of course, the latter won out: family is a big part of Christmas, not having everything decorated a certain way. So, this tree is a hodgepodge, but we have fun with it. 🙂

Here is the full view:

These are some felts ones I made early on in our marriage, I think from a kit. I love the little sheep.

This is a Boyd’s Bear ornament my dear friend Carol gave me:

This is from a set of Victorian ornaments that I love which icludes a ball and a teardrop shape with the same little flower cluster:

This is a nativity ornament which clips on to one of the light bulbs so it shines through. Someone gave this to someone else at a Secret Sister Christmas party at church, and I liked it so much I went out and bought one for us. 🙂 I think it is the only Hallmark ornament we have.

This is from a gingerbread man set. I think I got it (just because it is cute) from a store we used to have nearby that sold pools in the summer and Christmas stuff in the fall and winter, but it went out of business.

One of my sisters made these little cross-stitch banners for us one year.

This is from a cute little button and wire set.

This is one I made early on. It has about 1/3 of a toilet paper roll inside and is wrapped in a strip of red felt. White felt circles go over the ends and cross-stitch floss is used to sew the tops and bottoms on in that drum-like pattern. Then little strips of felt are rolled around the end of toothpicks for the drumsticks, and they are glued on. This is made to sit on a branch, but you could use the same floss to make a loop through the edge of the top white felt circle.

This is from a cute little felt snowman set I liked. I bought it rather than made it, but I made the little plastic canvas candy cane.

I took these off so I could take a picture of them in a set. I made them when I worked at a fabric store. Different workers would be asked to make different things from the store, the store would provide the materials, and we would get to keep them after they were taken off display. These are very simple, just cut from the print-outs on the cloth, sewn, and stuffed. If I were doing them today I would add some decorative stitching or quilting or something. I am almost to the point of not really wanting to use them any more, but the kids still love them. When they were little, they would be allowed to hang these and other soft ornaments on the lower branches while Jim and I hung the more delicate ones up high. As they got older, they were convinced that the little girl ornament was carrying an axe rather than a tree and that she was after the boy ornament with it, and they would hang them right next to each other. Boys. 🙂 🙄

This is another one I bought “just because” I thought it was pretty, and I love heart shapes.

These are a set I bought, I think, from some home-party company. Jesse enjoyed hanging them in a diagonal row across the front of the tree.

I don’t know where we got this one. I think maybe one of the kids got it during a Christmas party. It’s another one I would probably toss except they love it: they call it the “the misshapen bear.” I don’t know what happened to its little face. The white underneath is from a snowman ornament that is a little behind it from this perspective.

This one is special to me because it is one of the first ones I ever made. I found the little circle, stained it, found the little miniature tree, dipped the tips of its branches in glue and then it different colors of glitter, then glued it into the circle and added a gold thread loop.

When Jeremy and Jason were first in school, the school they were in asked committees of moms to make ornaments for the class each year. The ornaments were different from year to year and class to class just depending on what the moms for each room wanted to do. Eventually they stopped, I think because they didn’t have enough moms who had the time to keep doing it. I wished I had kept up the tradition of making an ornament for each of them each year. This is just one of those, made when Jeremy was in second grade.

This is, I think, our newest one, bought last year at the Christian bookstore. Having all boys, I’ve loved cards and ornaments with little shepherd boys.

This is from a set someone made for us, and, though I really appreciate the thought…. I don’t really like the ornaments themselves. But the boys love them.

This is one of my two attempts at One Stroke painting.

This is one of several cross-stitch ornaments I made several years ago. I think these were the first things I cross-stitched.

So, there you have a sampling of some of our favorite ornaments…a mixture of home-made and store-bought, elegant and childish, cute and….not. 🙂 We always enjoy putting them on as a family. Each boy has his own special ones he likes to put on, and we like to go over the stories of them.

Now, I am going to try to publish this post and hope it doesn’t crash with all of the pictures. 🙂 Come over to Morning Glory’s and scroll down to the Christmas tree treasure post to see some others’ treasures or link to your own.

Thanksgiving decorations

Posted on December 1, 2006 by Barbara Harper

(Friday’s Feast post is below.)

Before I change gears completely from Thansgiving to Christmas (I know, I know, most people are in full-fledged Christmas mode already. I like a little lag time inbetween 🙂 ), I wanted to post a few of my Thanksgiving decorations. I didn’t put up many fall decorations at all — it was just too busy to get them up. But I did want to add a few Thanksgiving touches.

These are my little pilgrims and Indians. I got them at a craft show in GA when we lived there. That craft show is one of the things I miss most about that place! There don’t seem to be many here in SC any more.

My husband got this Boyd’s Bear figurine for me on my birthday in August. ♥ I love those leaves — I got them through a home party called Home Interiors several years ago and I haven’t seen anything like them since. I’d love to find more. They have the fall colors only muted and pinkish, which works well in my house with pink in several rooms.

Here is a close-up of the figurine:

Finally, here is the cheery scarecrow I have on my front door:

I have some other scarecrows I usually put out — but they’ll have to wait til next year.

Though I love the Christmas season, I’m a little sad to bid autumn farewell.

Saturday Photo Scavenger Hunt: Time

Posted on November 25, 2006 by Barbara Harper

Grab the Scavenger Hunt code.Photo Theme. Join the blogroll. Visit participants.

This is a collection of some of our non-digital clocks. The one shaped like Idaho was made by my husband’s former pastor when both of them lived in Idaho. The three little ones in the front were some kind of award from the company where my husband used to work. The two off-white ones with pink roses were two I bought for the dining room and family room.

Works-For-Me-Wednesday: Decorating Styles and Ideas

Posted on November 1, 2006 by Barbara Harper

“That which we elect to surround ourselves with becomes the museum of our soul and the archive of our experiences.”
—Thomas Jefferson

I like to think of home decorating in light of the above quote. The way we arrange things, the type of things we collect, the colors we like, all provide a sort of window into our personalities. That must be why it is so much fun to go to other people’s houses.

Perhaps you have struggled sometimes, as I have, with almost feeling guilty about “decorating.” One excellent book along those lines is The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer. She points out that God “decorated” the earth; He made it beautiful, not just practical. We, of course, have to balance the urge to decorate with other areas of life that need attention and with the finances at hand.

Most of us can’t just go out and buy a houseful, or even a roomful, of furniture or accessories. Most of us start off with hand-me-down furniture from our parents, yard sale finds, etc. (a friend of mine describes her home décor as “early married.”) But as we do start to try to figure out what our own “look” is and try to incorporate that into what we have, one helpful way to do that is to go through some decorating magazines and pull out the pages that appeal to us (or, alternately, look at magazines in the library or decorating books at bookstores and jot notes, or search online). Then go back through those pages and note what appeals to you about those rooms in the pictures. Do you generally notice bright colors, deep, rich ones, pastels, or neutrals? Do you like the sleek lines and modern forms of a contemporary look, the cozy florals of a cottage style, or a rustic look? Do you like straight lines or softer curves? Do you like a lot of cozy clutter or a minimalist look? You’ll get an idea of what styles you like plus see ways of putting that style together. Then when you do need a new sofa or bedspread, or need to paint a room, you’ll have some idea of what you want to look for rather than being overwhelmed by the wide variety of choices. Having some pictures on file also helps you explain to your husband what you are trying to do or what look you are going for.

I started a file over 20 years ago for a Home Interiors class. The file then had required folders for different color combinations or period furniture styles. Over the years I adapted it to my own tastes. There is a file of ideas from magazines for each room, for window treatments, wall treatments (different painting techniques or ways to do wallpaper), wall groupings, and accesories. I want to add a folder for things like centerpieces. Sometimes it is fun and inspiring just to take out a file folder and browse through it.

For more tips, go to Rocks In My Dryer.