crafty thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving we are staying home - we invited a fried over, and are splurging on homemade Pizza Hut personal pizzas!  When I first found the recipe on Pinterest, I told everyone about it because it was soooo good and I pretty much demanded that they make it!  now, post-heart-attack-thinking me is screaming "oh my god - don't ANYONE make that!  it will kill you!"  haha!  So on the day of splurge eating, we decided that pizza sounded better than the traditional fixin's!

The pizza dough is terrific.  You divide it into 3 parts and let it rise in a cake pan (with some olive oil on the bottom so that when it bakes it's good and crispy!)

Of course the menu is also including roasted chestnuts!

So I spent the morning giving the embroidery machine a workout!  I made this cute pot holder!  I even made that bias trim myself!

And I did this adorable corn!  He'll be a potholder too.  I really don't need more pot holders, but sometimes I can't think of anything else to embroider!

Just the other day I bought a pack of cool patterns for tags.  Then today, all the patterns are 50% off!  of course!  i might get this in a smaller version, because 4"x4" is a little big.  I made the top one with a little batting inside.  It'll be cute to just include with a handmade gift - like tied to it.  If I wanted to attached it to something though, I'd like a smaller version.

Then I made this sachet for my mother - I filled it with lavender and attached a ribbon so she could tie it to the rod in the closet, or just put in in a drawer!  i thought a set of them would be better than just one, so I did another, but haven't put it together yet.  they're so cute!  

Ok, gotta go make a big salad!  Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!  

the dining room gets its turn!

This weekend we gave the dining room a little bit more of a makeover!  We went back to Atomic Fox in Yellow Springs and reunited the hutch with our new dining room table!  the hutch that matched our table was there back when we bought the table, but we weren't really in the market then.  We'd been using a hutch that my dad made way back when he and my mom got married - he made it right in the apartment!  it served its purpose, but we kept thinking about that hutch.  I liked the fact that it had glass fronts so the cats wouldn't knock off our "fine breakables".  And it was just much more mid century.  He gave us a good deal and we took it home!  We put it in the garage because we wanted to paint the dining room and it seemed silly to put it in, then have to take it out again.  This morning the fella decided we should paint TODAY!  he started taping the edges and unloading the room (as they say on the TV shows) and I went to buy paint.  We decided on orange because it's small and brightly light room that can handle the pop of color!  Here it is without a flash (it's so hard to take good pictures to actually show color!)  The new hutch is there in the corner with the owl on top - pretty sweet, eh?

And here it is with a flash.  It's called Knockout Orange from sherwin williams.

I'm going to make new curtains for the sliding glass door - i just ordered the fabric and lining.  It's this:

gosh, that color looks off on my computer too!  the color is called aquarius, and it's a dark teal blue/peacock.  It will look great with the orange.  In the living room we're going to do a light blue wall color and a similar print (from the same fabric line) but in a citrus/yellow-green.  Actually, the fabric I covered the chairs in below is the color that the living room curtains will be, but the print of the dining room curtains - see how it'll all flow together?!  the print on the chairs is half the size of the curtain print though - so it's a different scale.  I found that vintage table cloth ages ago and it just happens to fit the table!  thank god i didn't cut it up, which was my plan!  

And on Friday evening I finished the stockings for us!  yay!!

New old bathroom!

Yes!  finally a room that feels really personalized!  We got lots of art made, framed, and hung!  It's hard to see the dimensions, but it's a pretty long bathroom, so one wall is kind of like a gallery - we really wanted to fill it up!

Obviously the theme is fish!  the mister did all of the mid century inspired art, except for that one on the right in the green frame - i did that!  whee!

those yellow frames were some that we already had - just needed some spray paint!

The silver floating frames we got a Michael's on sale - get 3 for the price of 1!  sweet!

And then this little school of fish all alone.

He's working on another long narrow canvas!  super!  the fish will never end!  There's a small window in the bathroom too - i'd like to remove the old metal blinds and do something in fabric, but I'm still mulling it around. 

The girls are back in town!

11 months after moving into our new house, I finally got the girls out of their traveling box!  'bout time!

I can make the excuse that I've been busy with outside stuff, and I have, but I've hung other things.  The poor ladies, just got pushed to the end of the line, i guess.  Now they're free!

This weekend we got all kinds of stuff done!  One of which, is getting the bathroom painted.  When we moved in, the bathroom had this terrible old lady wallpaper:

The fella removed all that months ago, and it sat white for a while while we debated different colors (remember the potential reds?)  

Well, the tiles are a bit more peach than pink (i wish it was more pink!) and we decided to go with a green/blue.  What we ended up getting is probably a bit more blue/green.  it's strange how different color looks in different places - the drips on the can look much more mint green, but on the walls, it certainly looks more blue.  Either way - it's cool and very period for our 1961 ranch! 

The nice thing about having an artist for a fella, is that he can make some cool mid century-esque art for the walls.   He's got some cool ideas because I told him that I love those old chalkware bathroom wall hangings - especially the fish!  i don't know why, but fish just seem appropriate for the bathroom.  Or mermaids. The bad thing is that artist-type kind of work on their own schedule, so who knows when that'll materialize!  when it does, I'll take pictures!  

what I did on halloween

This year was the first year in a long time that I didn't have any trick-or-treaters!  I don't want to sound like a bah humbug (or whatever the halloween version of that is) but it was pretty great!  So how did I spend my time?  Making Christmas stockings for the cats!  haha!  I'm so into decorating for Christmas this year because we didn't get to last year - it was just us and a wall of boxes wondering if we might close on the house today.   These are the ones I made for the kitties:

They'll get a little toy or something, and Borris will probably get a collar with a bell because he's proved himself to be a real killer lately!  every few days he brings a dead bird or mouse or vole to the porch.  I know that's what cats do, but I wish he'd stop killing the birds.  He could, however, start killing moles and that'd be great!  Those darn things are the worst!!