Life is what happens while I am busy planning my next knitting design.
Last night, our dear neighbor joined us for dinner, cookies and gift exchange. As soon as she walked in the door, Elly was ready to unwrap the presents. Our neighbor barely had time to take her jacket off and sit down before Elly was ripping the paper off the presents.
She opened her gifts.
She opened our neighbor’s gifts.
She opened our gift.
She is a girl who loves presents.
We are swimming in cookies now.
I have only baked 3 batches myself.
Buttermilk sugar cookies (drop style with green frosting on top)
Cranberry chocolate cookies
Dan’s favorite, the Highland Shortbread cookies
Thanks to the cookie swap with the Mom’s Club, I look like a baking goddess though.
I still have one more batch of cookies to make because Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without my gingerbread men.
Growing up, we always made sugar cookies and I still do make them during our get together with friends, but I could take them or leave them. A few years ago the gingerbread men took their rightful place as my favorite cookies to make. Why?
Because the gingerbread men are so much fun to decorate and to personalize!
Because one wasn’t enough.
All the jingle bells that had been hot glued to this wreath were removed. 
Frankly, everything was removed. There was no way I was keeping that hot mess. Maybe I’ll try again soon to make an ornament wreath. After I make some Christmas cookies that is, but I digress. I was telling you about the new wreath.
A coat hanger looked like the perfect wire to hang the jingle bells on, but I was having trouble making it into a circle. I asked Dan for help and he mocked my choice of wires. Husbands are great, aren’t they? Then, he cut me a length of insulated copper wire from his supply on his tool bench. At first, the wire he cut was too thick for the bells to slide onto, but once the insulation was stripped off, it was perfect.
Elly helped me load the 60+ bells onto the wire.
At the top, I just twisted the wires together and curved one end to form a hook. Easy.
The queen of crafts has a full tutorial here on how to make a similar one though I think hers is smaller, but you could just make it bigger by cutting a longer strand of wire and using a paint can rather than a soup can.
The color on most of the bells are faded, but that is because I bought them used on eBay for a dollar plus shipping. Gotta love eBay. Besides, I like the dull finish. It offers the wreath a little color without overpowering the yarn wreath.
It was Elly’s first trip into Philly’s China Town and her first experience eating dim sum.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t her first experience in a China Town for we had visited the one in New York City when her aunt and uncle married in September. 
She was fantastic at dim sum!
She ate great from shimp and pork dumplings to sweet pork rolls and fried egg rolls. Her favorite was a sweet bun stuffed with pineapple.
After dinner she started getting a bit bored and wanted to go outside to run and play. We solved that problem with presents!
Christmas can never start too early.
Living in a small house has taught me a few things. It has forced me to keep a tight fist on the number of our possessions lest we not have space to sit down. I keep a donation box in my basement and at least once a month, I schedule a pick up from Purple Heart.
Living in a small house with small rooms has also taught me that tall furniture is akin to a brooding giant standing in a corner; they both make me feel cramped and nervous.
Thus, the 6-foot-tall bookcase in our living room had to go. Yet, we desperately needed the storage for Elly’s bedtime books, toys, our games and etc. Enter the wooden cubes at Just Cabinets. Since they are perfectly square, they look the same standing up as they do lying down. I plan to lay them on their side and build a pyramid. Cute, short and functional.
The only downside to the cubes is that they come unfinished. At first, I wasn’t concerned, but I had only forgotten how much work goes into staining and sealing furniture. It has to be cleaned, conditioned, stained, sealed, sanded and sealed again. It took me a week to complete one bookcase.
True, the pile of books looks worse than a brooding giant, but I was too impatient to wait another week or two while I stained and sealed the next 3 cube sections.
Because I couldn’t resist, here is the latest cute picture of Elly.
I love how the balloon keeps her modest.
Last year, I bought a basket full of red glass ornaments. They had called out to me. When I got them home, I stared at them for a while, but no bright ideas came to me. So, up in the attic they went. When pulling all the Christmas decorations out, I spotted the ornaments. I knew exactly what I wanted to make with them.
Instead my wreath looks like this.
Go ahead. Say it. It’s a hot mess. Either it needs more ornaments or it needs to be thrown in the trash. I haven’t decided which.
Unwilling to give up on a wreath idea completely, I pulled out the yarn strands and came up with this.
The bells were crocheted by my MIL a few years ago. She made them to be ornaments, but I don’t think she’ll mind.
Elly was excited over the wreath too and asked to be the one to hang it up.
Elly and I went to a Christmas party today with the Mom’s Club.
Santa made a special stop to visit us.
There no pictures of Elly with Santa. As soon as Santa arrived, Elly screamed and ran into the kitchen. When I picked her up and brought her back into the room that Santa was in, she spent the entire time convincing me that we should go upstairs, or in the kitchen or anywhere but where Santa was at.
Though for the record, she did love the book that Santa gave to her.
Did you guess who was Santa?
If you said Dan, then you were right.
After a few months of searching here and there, I found 2 replacement chairs for our dining room set.
The wood finish matches perfectly.
Though the fabric is lovely too, it does not the original gold or my bright, vibrant fabric.
I do have fabric that is more subtle than the bright orange and turquoise fabric, but I really love the bright colors and I wanted to tie the colors of my kitchen into the colors of the dining room without painting the walls turquoise. Dan is opposed to the walls being painted turquoise. He can be so stodgy sometimes.
What if I reupholster each of the remaining chairs in a different fabric? Is that too kitschy?
You’ll notice that none of the options listed above include reupholstering the new chairs. It’s for good reason. I can take a seat cushion off of a chair, wrap new fabric around it and staple it to the underside. But, I cannot reupholstered a chair as detailed as this. Check out the trim work on the chair.
These chairs were professionally upholstered and will stay the way they are until I learn a whole lot more about upholstery or until I make them slip covers. Maybe a hot glue gun could attach a trim like that. Perhaps, but I’m still not brave enough yet. Give me time.
As a child I had a few pet peeves: being dressed in outfits that matched what my older sister was wearing, being dressed in homemade clothes since they always looked homemade and old-fashioned and being called “the girls” rather than by my sister’s and my names. It made me so mad. I wasn’t anything like my sister and I wanted the world to know it.
Naturally, I vowed to never repeat the same annoying habits when I was older.
I have broken two of those vows in making these 4 aprons.
For Christmas, I made Elly and her 3 young cousins aprons. All the aprons were made from my favorite kid’s apron pattern, the Basic Child’s Apron by Sew Liberated. All the aprons were made from cotton laminate fabric with one exception as mentioned below.
In my defense, I tried very hard to make each apron slightly different.
Elly’s apron is larger than the rest because even though she has thinned out this year, she is still built like a linebacker. The front of her apron features the royal chevron apple fabric while the reverse features the citron chevron apple fabric.
Luke’s apron was made completely from the royal chevron apple fabric.
Lily’s apron was made completely from the citron chevron apple fabric.
Poor Brooke got saddled with the leftovers.
I ran out of the cotton laminate fabric, so the reverse side of her apron is made out of home decorator fabric.
Elephants! Hopefully she likes elephants as much as Elly does.
Though the aprons look like they were handmade, the fun fabric saves them from looking old-fashioned.
Pink Chalk Studio had a helpful list of tips on how to work with cotton laminate fabric. The stickiness of the fabric was a bit annoying to work with at times, but the end result is worth it. The aprons can just be wiped clean!
It hasn’t been that long since we replaced our antique washer machine.
Apparently, the old saying that bad things happen in threes is true. Our dryer was on its last legs and rather wait for it to quit running altogether or explode (both seem probable), we took advantage of yet another Boscovs sale and bought the mate to the washer machine.
True, there was nothing wrong with the TV and so I suppose it can’t be counted in my list of three, but it had long been on our list of things to replace.
Here is our old TV sitting on our porch waiting to be carted away.
People, we had yet to embrace technology and get a flat panel. I’m sure it was killing Dan, who loves to own and play with the latest gadgets. While we were at Best Buy, I actually encouraged and egged Dan on to buy the biggest TV in our budget. So, Dan is the proud owner of a 55″ TV.
Really, I don’t know what I was thinking. It feels massive in our little house. Massive.
Perhaps I just jinxed us by writing the old wives tale quote above. Our poor refrigerator that also came with the house and is perhaps older than me, has sounded like a rocket taking off this past year. A rusted, old rocket that coughs and sputters just to turn on, that is. It’s days are numbered. Unlike my progressive attitude towards the washer and dryer, I plan to do absolutely nothing about the fridge. When it dies, we’ll simply have to go shopping that day to buy a new one and pour the milk down the drain lest it spoil. Part of my attitude is due to the fact that we are overrunning in leftovers and I have no desire to empty the fridge out. The other part is due to the fact that I think my options are going to be limited and boring thanks to the small space I have to work with in my kitchen. To quote yet another old phrase, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
I love old phrases.
The Life, Designs & Crafts of Marie Haigh 