Something old ... Something new....

My old junktique gems and my recent Target finds are being joined together in the decorating of our little cottage this Christmas!

(click any photos to enlarge)

Remember my recent post about the tinsel wreaths I found in the Dollar Section of Target? One of them is now hanging on the big old junktique dresser mirror in our entryway.

And on it is this scrolly PEACE sign that I picked up on clearance at AC Moore after Christmas last year (I added the glitter, then propped it up in the middle of the wreath)...

#1 Old & New: Old mirror/New tinsel wreath and PEACE sign

Onto more old and new...

Back in February I showed you this Salvation Army find, a snowflake candleholder...

Rather than a candle, I decided to fill it with mini glass ornaments in my favorite cottage colors of blue, pink, and green. And do you see that sweet little deer peeking at you from the corner of the photo?


I just couldn't leave him behind when I spotted him on this little tray at Target last week!

#2 Old & New: Old snowflake candleholder/New Target deer tray

And just look at this sweet book that I picked up while out junktiquing a couple of weeks ago. The little church illustration on the cover is what first caught my eye... I've got it displayed on top of this scalloped pedestal tray, next to my church birdhouse...


The book is titled, "Let's Keep Christmas," a sermon by Peter Marshall, with an introduction by Catherine Marshall, copyright 1953 (I was just a baby that year)...


Dust jacket original price: $1.50... I love the Christmas trees on the endpaper, too...


The talented Barbara Cooney illustrated the book. I love her. When the girls were little, we loved reading Miss Rumphius (The Lupine Lady), one of our favorites by Barbara Cooney...

Bunny loves looking at the charming illustrations....


... which are all done in red or green. I so enjoy these old books. It's always such a treat to find a good one while out thrifting!


This is the Marshall family on the back of the dust cover, relaxing at home. Their house looks so much like the one I remember from my childhood, right down to their dog! We had a blonde cocker spaniel named Rusty back in those days...

#3 Old & New: Old book/Fairly New Pedestal Dish

So there you have it... a little bit of old mixed with a little bit of new... you can't go wrong when mixing it up with Christmas decorations!!! I'll be sharing a lot more of our Christmas decorations in the upcoming days and weeks!

Now please visit Cindy of My Romantic Home to see her beautiful bedroom Christmas Tree and to find a list of all the other bloggers participating in Show & Tell Friday!


Donna

Holiday Home Tour

Today I'm taking part in the 2009 Holiday Home Tour hosted by the lovely Tracey of Notes from a Cottage Industry. Please be sure to visit Tracey as she has posted links to many other bloggers who are sharing their Christmas decor! Thank you, Tracey!!

(click any photos to enlarge)

We took advantage of our daughters being home for Thanksgiving to trim the tree. It's definitely more fun when everybody is here to decorate... We bit the bullet a few years ago and bought an artificial tree (I'm not sure either girl has quite gotten over this yet, but when the last 'real' tree we had dropped every needle the day after Christmas, which meant we were still vacuuming up remnants of it the following summer, we decided it was time to go artificial.)


I wasn't able to download all of my photos, so I'm just going to share a bit of the living room for now... In future posts I'll show you the fireplace & mantel, the vintage birdcage all decked out for the holidays, the dining room, and much, much more.


Our living room is quite small so every year, in order to make room for the tree, the furniture has to be rearranged.


The tree definitely takes up quite a bit of the room, but it's well worth it - especially at night when the room is illuminated by just the tree lights...


In a future post I'll share the sentiment behind this year's window decorations.


I'll also show you more of my "Night Before Christmas" collection (I never get tired of looking at the beautiful illustrations in these books... The artwork is amazing, with each individual artist depicting this Christmas classic in a style that is unique to them)...

I often take advantage of after-Christmas sales to pick up heavily discounted bottlebrush trees in all styles and sizes. I've used them in several of my groupings around the house this year...

...including on the pie safe, where I plunked them down on top of my small collection of button vases. The glitter reindeer are from Target last year - can you ever have too much sparkle at Christmastime? I don't think so!

Now I'm off to finish downloading more Christmas photos! Thank you for stopping by to see the first of my holiday decorating posts! I wish you all a joyous holiday season...

Donna

Tinsel wreaths and pastel birds...

... found their way into my shopping cart this week...

During a quick trip to Wal Mart yesterday, I made a little side trip through the Christmas aisles. I'm thinking of decorating the dining room chandelier for Christmas this year and I needed some inspiration.

Well, when I spotted these sparkly birds with sequined wings and the palest aqua feathers, I couldn't resist...

And then there was my quick trip to Target earlier this week. Every year I put off buying stocking stuffers until the last minute and by then, all of the good candy is gone. So this year, with the shelves fully stocked, I purchased some candy for the girls' stockings... and then I browsed (I really shouldn't browse)... But in this case it paid off! Look what I found in the Dollar section - tinsel wreaths! They were pretty skimpy, as you can see, but for $1 apiece I figured what the heck, so I picked up 3 (they came in silver, green, and hot pink at our Target, but I liked the silver best - very vintage looking!)...


Well look at what these skimpy little wreaths blossom into when you pull and tweak all the little tinsel boughs! Woo hoo!! Score!!! (I don't think these are going to last long in the dollar section so if you're in the market for tinsel wreaths, make a dash to Target!) I know that some people think they're a bit gaudy and cheap looking, but oh, how they remind me of the vintage decorations of the Christmases of my childhood!! And being the nostalgic, sentimental fool that I am, I love anything from that era!

So I ended up with my inspiration - and decorations - for the chandelier in our little dining area...

Today I played around with everything to see how it would look, and we may just end up eating Thanksgiving dinner under a Christmas chandelier because I don't know if I want to take the time to disassemble it (only to reassemble it again next week!!) I'm joining Tracey's (Notes from a Cottage Industry) Virtual Holiday Home Tour on December 1st, and if any of you would like to join in and show off your Christmas decorations, just click here for details! And even if you don't want to participate, be sure to visit Tracey's blog that day because she'll have a list of blogs who've decorated for Christmas - and let me tell you (based on the past years) - it's spectacular! There's so much to see! Sometimes Tracey even spreads it out over several days! So on December 1st, make yourself a cup of tea, coffee, or cocoa, and then settle in and browse to your heart's content!

Happy decorating!

Donna

The college apartment - pink & green!

September 1st, otherwise known as student-move-in-day in beautiful Boston, home to a multitude of colleges and universities...

Come on in and I'll show you Court's home-away-from-home for the next year. When she and her roommates found this apartment, I fell in love with the floors and doorknobs....

Not to mention the gorgeous windows! Court and another girl will be sharing this room which is set apart from the rest of the apartment by beautiful French doors. (There's a smidge of hubby on the left, assembling the IKEA loft bed...)

If you take a peek outside you'll see U-Hauls, cars, and vans double-parked everywhere. As I said, September 1st in Boston is chaotic due to the vast numbers of students arriving from all over Massachusetts, the country, and the world, to move into their newly-leased apartments!!

Here's the little pink chair that was sitting in my living room last week, now waiting to be moved from Court's living room to her bedroom as soon as the bed is assembled... (I'm just loving the HUGE windows in this apartment... It's so bright and cheerful!)

Yeah! The loft bed is finished (and hubby said it went together very easily, which was an unexptected treat!) Okay, Court, now it's time for you to arrange your study area!

Fast forward a few hours...

Ta dah! Great job, honey!!

You be careful climbing that ladder! And don't forget you're in a loft bed if you get up in the middle of the night half asleep!

Oh, you are your mother's daughter for sure!! I love the psychedelic Paul McCartney on the left and the framed Beatles postcards on the right... That could have been my room back in the sixties...

The Wal-Mart desk, pink Target chair, and green IKEA chair all look great together! I'm loving all the colors you picked out!

Not to mention the $10 green Wal Mart floor lamp... Perfect for those nights when you're up late (studying :)...


(Amanda testing out Court's chair)... You did a great job putting this study area together, and now you definitely deserve to sit and rest a bit. We'll hang the curtains tomorrow...

Court and her roommate decided to move in on separate days, which was a very good idea since there would never have been room for the two dads to be assembling beds at the same time! So this is what it looked like when we left on day 1, with the left side of the room still empty...

But now it's time to head home through the Fenway... We need to rest up because not only do we come back tomorrow to hang curtains, we also start moving Amanda into her new apartment! So many changes happening!!!

Day 2 at the apartment...

The Wal-Mart clearance-priced shocking pink sheers are PERFECT for the French doors! ($2 for a package with two panels - you can't beat that price!).. You girls can keep them pulled aside during the day and close them up at night... I forgot to take pix of the curtains we hung in the big front windows! They were just white cotton tab tops (that were not see through or sheer so that I'd feel more comfortable knowing that nobody could look in on the girls!! ha ha)

I'm loving this apartment... Could I be a city girl? I think there's a very good possibility that I could!

Donna

Mini makeover for the smallest bathroom ever...

I kid you not!


small... small... small.... Ready for the grand tour?


Look to the left... (no need to even turn your head, just move your eyes)...


Now look to the right... Okay, tour's over!

I know some of you probably thought it couldn't get any worse than my windowless kitchen blogpost, but here it is... the windowless bathroom blogpost - and it's the one and only bathroom we have in our house (with the exception of one down in the basement off the room that Court is using as her bedroom).


The inspiration for this mini facelift was this scrumptious Simply Shabby Chic shower curtain that I picked up this past January at Target - on sale! (Recognize it, Claudia? Claudia had one just like it at Mockingbird Hill Cottage west! She's so clever - she repurposed it at MHC east into a table skirt!)


The reason it has taken me since January to redo the bathroom is because I didn't actually hate the old bathroom decor... in fact, I quite liked it! But, as someone pointed out when I posted this original canvas painting in a blogpost once, it wasn't wise to perhaps have it in the bathroom with all the steam from the shower, etc. Good advice! I decided I liked the painting too much to risk it getting ruined... And although I absolutely LOVE my white battenburg lace shower curtain, as you can see, I have all white walls, I painted my sink vanity white, and the over-the-toilet storage unit is white... It was just too much white, white, white... The room definitely needed a little OOMPH!


So yesterday I got busy and finally tackled the mini makeover. First I scoured the bathroom, top to bottom, inside and outside the tub, every crevice in and around the toilet, every nook and cranny I could find (isn't that always fun? Actually, I guess some people do enjoy cleaning bathrooms... I'm just not one of them.) And then I hung the shower curtain. I'll save my white battenburg for someday if I ever have another bathroom.. or if I ever decide to paint the walls with a color other than white!

The canvas painted ocean scene has been replaced by early photos of my girls wearing their "no tears" shampoo visors. (If these get ruined from the steam, I can just reprint them from my computer!)

Look at the dainty little ruffle all along the bottom edge... That's what I love about Rachel Ashwell... It's all about the details, and she makes the most of them!


As a matter of fact, this is an old chenille bath mat I've had for years, and if I remember correctly, it's also from the Simply Shabby Chic line. I think it's the perfect match for the shower curtain!


These are the shower curtains hooks I've had for years and I absolutely love them!


They started out as a dark purplish-pink with dark green foliage, but as soon as I got them home from Wal-Mart I painted the roses white and the leaves & stems light green.


Some embellished towels add a little bit to the cottage feel...

I've had them for about 15 years... They're pale pink with a blue, green, & pink floral border, so even though the patterns don't match the pattern on the shower curtain, I think they look good together... (Did I ever tell you I have a great fear of mixing and matching patterns? I love the look when other people do it, but it scares me to try it myself...)

I have a couple of these (very) inexpensive french buckets from The Christmas Tree Shop and this one happens to be the perfect size for holding 2 rolls of TP... If there's one thing I hate running out of, it's toilet paper!

And last, but not least, hanging up next to the vanity is this little vintage-styled FAIRY SOAP plaque that my sister gave me several years ago... I just love it in our little cottage bathroom. So that concludes the tour of our one and only little bathroom (which, although small, sure beats the outhouses of days gone by) !! Hope you all have a lovely week!..... Donna