Floral Fridays

Source: frolic-blog.com via Karen on Pinterest

A little Spring for your wintery day. We do have strawberry farm stands up already.  We are forecast to get snow down to 1,000 feet tomorrow.  That would be amazing indeed.  I will be packing in lieu of shoveling.  See you later!  

Lotta Books

Packing for a move always brings you across old memories. This bookshelf is full of my daughters' old books. Sorry for the poor photo. We're a book reading family. Actually everybody but me is a voracious book reader. I read the occasional novel, but inhale magazines. I haven't even begun to pack those yet!  Please tell me you understand! Actually, my HH passed on the book reading genes and I passed on the magazine devouring genes.  My girls were doomed from the beginning.  

This is what HH calls his "working" bookshelf. Yeah, it's working all right. Working to make me CRAZY! One shelf is mine. One.

This is my pretty bookshelf.  Some books, more pretties. Among other things, it holds my husband's old toys, Papaw's old license plate, Great Grandpa's gameboard and smattering of my flower frog collection. 

Now these are my kind of books!  This does not include my cookbooks, knitting and gardening books. They're downstairs in a whole different bookshelf.  It has yet to get packed. Probably tonight. Books are easy to pack, but HEAVY!

Then there are the beautiful old books that I get for a song at thrift stores.

I've been instructed to NEVER, EVER get rid of all these old children's books.

This Berenstain Bears' book has to be at least 23 years old.

I'll love you forever, such a good thing to tell your children.

I'm sure you have stashes of books you can't part with too.  What was your favorite children's book?

What Makes a House a Home?

Now that we're packing up Elderberry Street it's losing it's homey feeling.

I hate to take down all of the "stuff", not because there's SO MUCH of it, well maybe a little. Basically because it loses it's feeling of home; the familiarity, the memories, the comfort.

Good memories are essential to making a house feel like a home.  

Filling it with family and friends that you love.  This was DD2's Ugly Christmas Sweater party.

There's that feeling of peace and calm.

It will take awhile.  My DD2 thinks it will take FOREVER, for the new place to feel like ours.

All I know is, we've done it all before. This is house number 10, I believe, not including four apartments.  They always manage to feel like home, hopefully sooner than later. What helps you feel like home in your house?  

Bracelet Reminders

{Martha's knot bracelet}

My Monday night neighborhood Bible Study has recently started Beth Moore's Believing God study.  It is an incredible study so far, I always get so much out of her studies.  In Believing God she asks everyone to come up with a blue bracelet. This is why. . .

Beth refers to Numbers 15:38-39 NLT -
³⁸ “Give the following instructions to the people of Israel: Throughout the generations to come you must make tassels for the hems of your clothing and attach them with a blue cord. ³⁹ When you see the tassels, you will remember and obey all the commands of the Lord instead of following your own desires and defiling yourselves, as you are prone to do.


She also uses Joshua 3:5 NLT -
 ⁵ Then Joshua told the people, “Purify yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do great wonders among you.”

These blue bracelets are to be reminders to us during this study if we obey God's commands he promises to do amazing things in our lives.  

I thought I'd make our group some blue bracelets.  Last year I had saved these instructions from MSL for these pretty bracelets. I "happened" to come upon the instructions recently. Let me tell you, my filing system leaves a lot to be desired. I think they were in the "to file" pile, which is huge, btw. Finding their recommended beautiful cord is practically impossible at the local JoAnn's. Since we don't have NYC's famous millinery stores, that's the best I could do. I'm actually using some nylon ribbon yarn that seems to be working well, along with buttons from my Grandmother's button box. I have 22 of these babies to get done by Monday! I'm definitely going to use the easier knots for this quantity. It's a very simple little gift for some amazing ladies. I hope they like and use them.

Crazy Happy Valentine's Weekend!

Valentine's Day is best celebrated simply.  A little card (homemade is best).

 A little homemade pizza.

 Some awesome chocolate waffles.

 Warmed up syrup.

And a little Valentine sugar cookie to top it off!

Our weekend was filled with good family and friend times. We saw The King's Speech, and Colin definitely should get an Oscar for that one. He's always a favorite ever since Mr. Darcy. OH! I should've watched Pride and Prejudice over Valentine's Weekend!  Might have to add that on next year.  Went to dinner with friends, a very crowded Rose Bowl Flea Market, put our house on the market and got an offer on the first day! Whew! Well, that explains the lack of posting.  I thought I'd share this awesome sugar cookie recipe with you.  

SUGAR COOKIES WITH ORANGE
1 1/3 c shortening
1 1/2 c sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp orange peel
4 c sifted flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
8 tsp milk
Cream together shortening and sugar, add eggs and beat until fluffy.  Add vanilla and orange peel and mix thoroughly.  Sift dry ingredients together  and add to creamed mixture with milk.  Divide in fourths and chill for at least 1 hour.  Cut and bake on ungreased cookie sheet for 10 minutes at 375*.  
(This are soft and very difficult to roll and cut out.  I rolled them out pretty thick onto parchment and it worked much better)


ICING
1 pkg (4 cups) powdered sugar
1/2 c (1 stick) butter
1/3 cup milk (I used cream :-)
2 tsp vanilla
food coloring
Beat sugar and butter until creamy and add vanilla.  Add milk gradually until desired consistency.

As you can see I baked a couple of things for Valentine's Day.  What is your favorite Valentine goodie?

Floral Fridays

{martha}

So, I'll probably post this bouquet every year on the Friday before Valentine's Day.  It's just so sweet and perfect.  I already made heart shaped biscuits for breakfast this morning.  There are other plans in the works.  Have a Valentine's Weekend full of Love!

An Unexpected Resource. . .

I was toodling around on the inner workings of this blog this morning trying to figure out something technical. I have to do it the hard way, figure it out on my own, (I still haven't), when I ran across the Stats tab.  It was very interesting. Evidently the most read post on my blog is about the paint colors I've used in my home.  It's entitled Favorite Paint Colors.  This was funny to me, but as I was reading through the long ago post, I realized that it was the answer to a very current problem I'm having.

Because we're moving soon, we've removed some items that are "attached" to our home, so that the prospective buyers won't want to keep them.  So, my beautiful custom kitchen draperies have been removed and replaced with some pretty Pottery Barn panels.  

Sorry, this is the best photo I could come up with.  You can see a post about them here.

My bedroom ceiling fan has been removed, and a chandelier has been replaced with the builder grade one.  The most recent removal was my FAVORITE vanity mirror from Restoration Hardware.  I love it.  

Fancy hotels have these and they make such a big difference in make-up application.  Well, taking it out was not such an easy task.  See my Hunky Husband's smiling face on my sidebar?  Well, it wasn't so smiley last weekend.  Anyway, the quest to match the paint was on.  As you can see, I have several cans of blue paint, all varying degrees of tints.

Evidently I like blue, a lot. In order to cover the patched spots that occurred with the removal of the mirror I had to match the paint.  Well, Benjamin Moore's Silver Mist did not prove to be the correct color.  Looks like the closest match is Sherwin Williams Waterfront Blue.  Although it's a bit faded from time.  I never thought an old blog post would help me remember the colors of my walls.  Next time, label all paint cans! 

It doesn't have to be complicated. . .

{whipped bake shop}

There are so many fabulous Valentine posts in the blogosphere these days.  I've saved a few for reference. Take a look and try to give some simple love gestures this week.

1.  Check out this precious crocheted heart.
2.  Super simple Valentine pizza, definitely have to do this on pizza night!
3.  How about a Valentine breakfast or just an evening sweet treat?
4.  A really simple addition to your Valentine card.
5.  Martha's simple Valentine table
6.  Show some fruit love.
7.  Just a little bag of goodies.
8.  Chocolate is a must!
9.  It doesn't have to be elaborate.
10.  Give a beautiful handmade card.

Floral Fridays

{country living}

This beautiful wreath is just perfect for the month of February. I don't really know why pink gets such a bad rap. Many bloggers are saying they don't like pink. What's not to like? Seriously, it's a beautiful color.  If you want to see more beautiful floral photography visit The Pioneer Woman.  She just finished a photo contest that had amazing entries. I don't know how she picked a winner! I wanted to post my favorites on here, but they are restricted. Be sure to check them out, they're beautiful.  Makes me want to work more on my photography skills.  Have a lovely, pinkish kind of weekend!  

Paint Color Choices

Have you ever struggled with deciding on what paint color to choose for a room? Well, I think probably everybody has at some point. Come on, you can admit it. I would so love to get my hands on the walls of our new house!  Final walk thru is this Friday, hopefully all the repairs will finally be finished.  

As you can see there is a lot of chocolate brown in this house.

The rooms are sunny and big enough to handle this color very well.  But, I'm feeling need for a change.

I tend to like lighter and brighter rooms.

{country living}

{marthastewart}

{coastal living from myhomeideas}

Well, I stumbled onto this great series of posts by PK from Room Remix. She asks the questions we all ask when choosing paint colors to several other blogger/designers.  There are specific color recommendations along with room pictures.  I saved it for future reference!  Click on her button and take a look.