2013 Holiday Home Tour

It's our first Christmas in the new house, and we are loving it! We got hit by a huge winter storm on Thursday night that blanketed the house in a pretty (and treacherous) blanket of ice. It makes the outside decorations look extra festive, don't you think?

 

Our neighbors put these reindeer out on the curb for trash pickup a couple months ago. When I was growing up in Florida, we had reindeer like this in our front yard as part of our Christmas decorations. One year they were stolen during the night, much to my mom's dismay. The funny part is that they were returned to us a few years later! Can you believe that? Anyway, I saw these on the curb and nostalgia kicked in. I had to have them, even though they were a little "broken." Please note how the husband created a splint for Blitzen so he could stand proudly in the front yard!

We didn't want to buy any new decorations, so we re-purposed the garland and wreaths from our old house to make a window display that works with this house.

My flea market ice skates decorate the wreath on our front door. I love how the white skates pop against the darker background! I was very tempted to take the skates off the door and use them to skate around our driveway this weekend, but I resisted.

Right inside that front window is our dining room with my colorful, splarkly tablescape that I spoke about in my last post.

 

One of the really fun parts about this new house is that we have more than one living space. I decided to take advantage of the separation and use different holiday color schemes than I've used in the past. Playing off the hot pink touches in the dining room, I decorated the formal living room with shades of pink, blue, green and gold. 

 

Those are the DIY felted trees I made last year. The great thing about white is that it goes with everything! I snazzed them up with some thrift store pink ornaments and our old tree topper (that is actually too heavy for our tree) under a cloché.

The tree is tucked away in the corner, topped off with my DIY paper tree topper. Fabric scraps and extra ribbon added a colorful touch to a strand of lights around our french doors leading into my office. That was the perfect project to do while watching a Christmas movie. Anyone can cut strips of fabric and tie knots! I think it has a very charming, homespun effect that balances some of the more "glitzy" touches in the living and dining room.

A tree looks so much better with pretty presents underneath, don't you think? I used some gold faux bois wrapping paper from the post-Christmas sale at Marshalls last year to wrap the gifts we've purchased so far. They were accented with either pink, black or forest green ribbon, depending on the gender of the recipient.

 

Because I used so many of our favorite ornaments for the dining room tablescape, I needed to fill some empty spots on our tree. Not wanting to spend money, I decided to use more fabric scraps, along with wire ribbon and curling ribbon to add colorful touches on the cheap. 

My office is a bright white space, so I wanted to keep the Christmas decorations pretty simple in there. How adorable are these grey, white and gold polka dot gift boxes from Target? I'm in love with them. The color scheme would work for Christmas, a wedding, a baby shower...

I bought this gold garland from the Martha Stewart parties section at JC Penney. It's not specifically holiday decor, but I figured it would work with the neutral scheme in this room. And yes, the horse statue is wearing a dog scarf. Rory was grateful that I only made her wear it for a few minutes before transferring it to the horse!

This big red bow makes our flea market light fixture look like a vintage ornament, don't you think?

 

The den is where I kept things extra warm and traditional using our usual color scheme from past years, red and green.  It's the coziest spot in the house, for sure!

So, do you have your holiday decorations up yet?

Do you like to stick to traditional colors or more modern schemes? I love that this house allows me to have both without them clashing with one another. It lets me be extra creative and try new things!

For more ideas, check out our 2012 Christmas home tour. It's interesting to see how the same decorations had a completely different look in our old house.

Glam, Colorful Holiday Tablescape

If you've been following this blog for a while, you might remember that I always create a holiday tablescape for a Christmas event at my church each year. This is my third year doing it, and it's always a fun challenge to come up with a completely differently look from the previous tables I've created. Of course I don't want to buy a bunch of new stuff I'll only use once, so I try to create a new theme using existing items I have around the house.

This year I decided to do a colorful, Kate Spade-inspired table using some non-traditional Christmas colors. It was quite the departure from my classic, equestrian-inspired table from 2012 and the soft neutrals of the pear tree theme in 2011. As always, I started collecting beautiful images on Pinterest to get some inspiration and ideas for the table. (View my inspiration board here.)

My inspiration pieces for this year's table were these oversized mercury glass ornaments I bought at the Wisteria post-Christmas sale last year. They always have an amazing post-Christmas sale, and I scored each one of these 12 inch and 10 inch ornaments for less than $10! Inspired by this Pinterest photo, the I brought in my thrifted green glasses and some green chargers from Target. 

By arranging the ornaments as a makeshift table runner down the center of the table, it creates a low centerpiece dinner guests can see over to talk to one another. There's nothing worse than a beautiful centerpiece that blocks the view from one side of the table to another!

Even with the pops of green and gold on the black and white tablecloth, it was still lacking something. My mom and I were fiddling with the table and decided to bring in my pink napkins from Anthropologie for another fun touch of color. I bought those on sale a really long time ago, but this was my first time to actually use them. The hot pink was a game changer and really made the tablescape come alive. From there we were rolling...

A special thank you to my friend Renée Fernandes for taking these lovely photos. I always do a practice run on my own table before the event, so she came over to take these photos of the table in our dining room before I packed it up and took it to the church.

Alright, let's talk materials! 

The "tablecloth" is simply three yards of fabric from Ikea. The striped pattern provides the modern, preppy-chic background I was picturing for the Kate Spade vibe. Love it!

From there I just wanted to add a lot of sparkle, so I incorporated the gold beaded placemats from HomeGoods underneath the chargers from Target. I love the circle- square-circle layered look that makes with my thrifted china on top! Without the dark green in between, it didn't have as much depth and wasn't quite as interesting. 

Speaking of sparkle, I used glitter wrapping paper from Michael's to wrap up small gift boxes for each place setting As much as I love the glitter and how it picks up the candlelight on the table, that stuff was incredibly frustrating to work with! The texture of the glitter meant that tape couldn't grab hold of it. How are you supposed to wrap a present without tape?! As I was fiddling with the tape problem, I ended up getting glitter all over my office table, my hands, my face, the works. EVERYWHERE!

Some of my favorite ornaments were hung from our spray painted thrift store chandelier (which is still one of my favorite things in the house) with fishing line to help carry the theme upward. I love how they float above the table. 

I found a couple of fun items at the thrift store to add to the ornaments pile in the center of the table, including all of the pink, blue and white ornaments and the little gold candle holders and tapers. I really love how the candlelight bounces around all of the metallic and sparkly surfaces on the table.

I made the name cards using a blank white 5x7 folded greeting card and a gold paint pen. Super easy!

Full Resource List:

China plates: thrifted • placemats: HomeGoods • chargers: Target (Threshold) • oversized gold ornaments: Wisteria • oversized silver ornaments: Wisteria • napkins: Anthropologie • gift boxes, wrapping paper, ribbon: Michael's • gold sparkled flatware: Ross with DIY touch using glitter craft paint • green goblets: thrift store • dotted wine glasses: Kate Spade • mercury glass lanterns: flea market • candle holders: thrifted • colorful ornaments: thrifted

To help tie in the colors of the table with the existing items in the dining room, I brought in pops of pink on my shelves and with the accent pillows. A scrap of pink fabric was wrapped around each pillow, along with a gold feather ornament from Hobby Lobby a few years back. 

The shelves behind the dining table got a dose of pink and green, too. 

 It was my mom's idea to put this Christmas tree on the top shelf in front of the mirror so that the ornaments would be reflected and give us double the fun color up there. Love it!

If you stand at the front of the table and look back into the house, you get a sneak peek of our other decorations. Such a fun view!

So what do you think of the tablescape? We had the event at church last night, and it seemed like a lot of people liked the table. Now that I've done three completely different looks– which one is your favorite?

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DIY Paper Star Christmas Tree Topper

When we were setting up the Christmas tree the other day, it became obvious that our existing tree topper was way too heavy for our tree. Does anyone else have this problem? They sell so many pretty tree toppers, but almost all of them seem like they are too heavy to sit nicely on top of the thin branch at the top of the tree.

I was trying really hard to spend as little cash as possible on Christmas decorations this year, so I wanted to come up with a DIY solution. Naturally I turned to Pinterest, and my search turned up this really simple DIY paper star. I figured it would be perfect because we could customize the paper to our taste and the material would be lightweight enough to actually function as a tree topper.

Using the simple tutorial from DIY Home Sweet Home, I used some white scrapbook paper and my gold paint pen to create a cute polka dot paper star to adorn our Christmas tree!

In order to stick it on the tree, I simply threaded the top branch through a hole in the star, using one of the points of the star to brace it on the back side. The tutorial uses a wooden dowel to attach the star, but I didn't have one of those at my disposal so I just made due without it.

I'll be back next week with better photos of the entire tree, plus details about repurposing scrap fabric and curling ribbon to create a colorful, happy Christmas tree! I'm also planning to take good photos of all of our Christmas decorations, both inside and out, over the weekend. Look for that post on Monday. This is one of my favorite times of year to be a home blogger because there is so much festive stuff to chat about! Ho ho ho!