Pink Spring Tablescape

It is another beautiful Spring day today!  All the pretty blooms have inspired me to create a table setting for a Springtime celebration.

I started with my grandmother’s pink rose china that she recently gifted me.  My grandmother Sarah Elizabeth “Lib” is my namesake, and besides a name, we share a love of pink roses!  She bought this beautiful china over 50 years ago.  It was her “fancy china” that she’d pull out anytime they had company for dinner.  I’ve always admired the delicate pink rose pattern, and Granny promised that one day she would pass it down to me.  So this year while we were visiting her at Easter, she let me pack up her beloved china and bring it home! :) 

I layered all the cute bowls and set the table for tea, as well.  Then I added my pink glassware that I received as a wedding gift.  The delicate footed glasses are perfect!  The embroidered white napkins I borrowed from my Mama.  I folded those up with my metal dragonfly napkin rings.  How appropriate for Spring! :)

The centerpiece is a bunch of pink silk flowers (can’t wait for my real peonies!) in my crystal basket vase that I got at an antique store.  I paired that with my crystal candlesticks and a couple of smaller crystal vases. 

Over on the flatware cabinet I put a trio of candlesticks that my Mama gave me for my birthday.  They match the paint color in here so perfectly!  They have flowers, butterflies and bees painted on them.  So sweet. :)  The little bunny is another springtime touch. :) (Thanks Andi!)

Now I’m ready for a Mother’s Day brunch! :)

In the meantime, I have weeds to pull and flowers to plant.  Have a Happy Spring Weekend!

A Bear Themed Nursery

My new nephew Barrett is almost three months old, which means it is past time for me to share his nursery with you all!  Last year when we were brainstorming nursery plans, my sister picked a woodland/bear theme for the nursery. (Since his name would be Barrett—which I didn’t know at the time!)  She painted the walls a pale blue/gray and the crib and changing table were inherited from big brother Ruger’s room. 

We found an adorable fabric collection at Joann’s with several coordinating prints of bears, foxes, moose, owls, and woodland themed graphics.  So we picked our favorites and a few stripes to match and made the nursery bedding and curtains.  The quilt is a pre-printed panel which Hannah stitched up with a coordinating print on the back and then quilted around the characters on the front. 

My mother recovered the armchair, which used to be in her house when we were kids.  New life for an old chair!

I have been obsessed with embroidery hoop art for a while, so I decided to do a couple for Barrett’s room.  I think they turned out nicely! :)  I had a lot of fun making them, too!

I also painted a couple of animals for the opposite wall.  My dad made the wooden frames for me with old fence slats and I copied the characters from the fabric prints.  :)

Isn’t this rocking bear adorable?  It was a gift from Barrett’s grandparents!  :)

The little fella seems right at home in his new nursery, don’t you think?

Love you baby bear! :)

Early Spring Blooms

My yard is looking so beautiful with these warmer Spring temps.  I had some mulch delivered a month ago and that has really spruced up the front beds.  The daffodils and forsythia are almost finished blooming and the creeping phlox are starting to put on their flower show.  I am so excited, I love Spring!  So, here is a glimpse of the blooming beauties from around the yard…

The periwinkle is really fantastic this year, it’s about to take over this wooded bed, which is fine with me!  :) I love the little purple blooms.

Next up in the blooming department will be the bleeding heart, and my new Kwanzan cherry tree. Can’t wait to see its blooms this year! :) In the meantime, you can find me moving mulch and planting perennials.  Lots of work to be done this time of year!  I also have a special project reveal in the backyard so stay tuned for that!  Happy Spring!

Spring Kitchen Updates

Hi friends!  Spring has sprung!  It is beautiful outside today and now that the sun is shining I had the opportunity to shoot some pictures of my Spring-ified kitchen! Yay!

Michael recently had a birthday and he got this cool magnetic knife rack as a gift.  (Thanks Brandon!)  We installed it on the wall under the cabinet and were able to fit all our necessary knives on it.  The big Santoku in the middle is the one we use most of the time.  Those others are just for emergencies… and bread…. or the zombie apocalypse. :)

The new knife rack cleared up the whole corner where the knife block used to live.  I moved the cookbooks over by the microwave.  Now there is so much room on the counter!

Since Spring is finally here I decided to herald its arrival with a few new plants.  The planters and the little variegated plant came from Ikea.  I love how the planters match my white stripe canisters!

My friend and I made a trip to Ikea a couple weeks ago and we had a great time looking at all the showrooms and then browsing the décor items.  I bought this beautiful white tray that I had filled with magazines for a while.  But I thought it deserved a more special presentation, so I put it on the kitchen table with a few Springtime accessories. :)

Everything looks fresh and clean in here and I’m loving it! :)  Welcome Spring!  I’ll be back soon with a post on my Spring blooms in the yard!  Hope you’re enjoying this lovely weather!

P.S.  For more updated content, check out my updated House Tour page!

Art for the Master

I’m a country girl at heart, even though I live near the “big city” now (not really!) and I’ve always wanted a painting of a barn to hang in my house.  I love barns.  Especially old, rustic, falling-down ones.  So, when my mother saw a raffle for a barn print by Ward Nichols at a local church bazaar, she decided to buy a bunch of tickets in hopes that we would win.  And lo and behold, the ticket she entered under my name was the winner!  Hooray!  I never win anything!  I think she was kind of expecting me to give her the print, since she bought the ticket.  I told her we could share custody… that is until I saw it hanging over my bed.  The end.  My barn print!  :)  Thanks Mama!

It’s called “First Snowfall” by Ward Nichols and it is framed with a beautiful tan linen mat.  The tones in the print are just perfect in my bedroom, so serene and lovely.  :)

The linen mat also ties in nicely with the embroidery on the drapes and the tan linen lampshade.

The former bedroom art went to live over the mantel in my botanical inspired mantelscape.  I think this art is a much better complement to the blues and browns in the bedroom.  I also moved the family tree that was on the side wall to the hallway and put something else there that didn’t compete for attention with my new barn print.  I think it looks perfect!  :)

Simple DIY Drop Earrings

I am a newcomer to the earring world, since I just got my ears pierced last year when I turned 30.  Hard to believe, I know!  But now that I have passed that milestone (finally!) I am really getting into earrings!  I spend a lot of time browsing Etsy for neat-looking earrings that are small and dainty.  Since I have newly pierced ears, I am not quite ready for the big dangly ones, and the small dangly ones are hard to come by and they cost $14 a pair!  So I decided I would try making some earrings for myself!

After looking on Etsy for ideas and seeing other people’s earrings (never paid much attention before! haha!) I decided to try a simple crystal drop style earring.  I found lots of helpful tutorials since I was totally clueless as to how to begin. 

Diane from In My Own Style had a helpful tutorial for simple beaded earrings.  She also had a tip to use old jewelry that you get secondhand, take it apart and reuse the beads.  Great idea!  I actually had a beaded necklace that I had never worn, so I took that apart and garnered a few silver beads for my project as well as a bunch of miscellaneous beads that I might use later.  Then I went to Michael’s and bought a pair of jeweler’s pliers, headpins, eyepins, ear wires, and some crystals and beads.  The pliers are important because they have rounded points which allows you to make perfect loops to join your wires.  (Needless to say, mine are not perfect, but I am getting better!)  I also used another pair of needle-nose pliers and a pair of wire cutters that I already had.

So after gathering my supplies I spent a little while designing my earrings on the headpin.  This tutorial from beadage.net shows how to use a headpin:

I put some beads together on a pin to see if I liked the combination and rearranged them until I was happy.  Michael helped, too, he is surprisingly opinionated about earrings! :)  After I got my beads in a row, I followed this simple tutorial for making the top loop.   Don’t pretend you know what you are doing, just follow the rules! :)

After making my semi-perfect loop, I just strung them onto my ear wire and closed the loop.  Voila!  This kind of earring is super easy!  Here are the ones I made with just a few purple bicone crystals, some silver beads and a headpin.  This pair is 1 3/8” long from the top of the ear wire.  You can make them shorter or longer depending on how many beads are on the wire. 

This pair looks really cute with both blue and purple! 

The next kind of earrings I wanted to make involved a chain of beads with loops.  I found these adorable light pink glass drops in a pendant kit at Michael’s.  The kit was an assortment of pink and purple beads (right down my alley!) and these drops matched the bicone crystals I picked out.  To make these into earrings, I had to thread a wire through the top of the teardrop and then form a loop.  That loop was joined to another crystal that I put on an eyepin (which already has a loop on one end) then cut and formed into a loop.  The whole chain then hangs on the ear wire.  Not as easy, but definitely more fun, since all the little loops in the chain make the earring swing around more!  These are also 1 3/8” from the top of the wire, just right for me!

And for my third pair, I used the same technique except with two crystals.  Dark pink and light pink joined by loops.  These are so cute, they are just a bit over an inch from the top of the wire.  Dainty and sweet!

Making the little crystal charms is really fun and rewarding once you get the hang of it.  I still have tons of beads and wires, so I’ll definitely be making more earrings in the future.  Hope you enjoyed my little “tutorial” on earrings.  Try it yourself, the supplies are inexpensive and next time someone compliments your earrings you can say you made them yourself! :)

P.S. For more earring inspiration, check out my Pinterest Board: DIY Jewelry.