Just Garland

I just got home from a day of running to sick kiddos to the Dr.s but I didnt' want to miss out on the Nesters Mr Linky party, so I am posting some quick pictures of my garland and if you want to see all of the house, keep poking around my blog and you will see it all!

A close up of the candles in the garland

More candles!
you gotta have feathers and fruit!

and giant pinecones from Sequoia

And a full picture of it all! It really is more beautiful in person, but this is the best I can do with pictures!

Why?

I would just like to know why my post is sitting on top of my last post????!!!! I will keep trying to fix that, you are missing out on pretty pictures!

Tour of Homes 2008

Each year on post the OCSC has a fundraiser called Holiday Tour of Homes. We were privelaged to be a part of it both last year and this year. It is a blast to decorate the home in expectation of around 100 women and husbands walking through your home. A little stressful at times too! I will try to put as many pictures on here as I can. If you were not able to attend the tour, go and grab a cup of coffee and sit back and enjoy your own personal tour brought to you via the internet!

This is on our front porch as we welcome you into our home.

As you walk in, to your right is our family room. The stained glass window was Jason's present to me on our 8th anniversary.

A little Holiday message on the entry way wall. I love those vinyl rub on stickers. I sure hope I am able to save them for next year! Any ideas on how to save them?

The next area of our home you walk in to is our dining room / kitchen. We decided to move our table in here so that we would be closer to the kitchen and because it is the biggest room in the house and our table is huge! It has worked out well. Remember the "magical hanging indoor forest" Well here are the best pictures I could get of it and also of the "amazing garland" that I made. The Nester is having a Mr. Linky party tomorrow for garlands and I am hoping to figure out how to post mine on there. (and hopefully have a link on here also)

I have a zillion more pictures to post - - I do have the entire upstairs to show you yet, but for fear of losing what I have already done, I will post it in a second post. I hope you have enjoyed the tour so far!

First pictures of the Amazing Garland!!!

As soon as hubby got home tonight I asked him if he knew where the camera was, of course he did, it was on the shelf right next to the hook where I usually hang it. But of course I didn't see it because I didn't want to turn on the lights to look because I have all the Christmas lights up and I love how they look and I didn't want to ruin the mood by turning on overhead lights!

So these are the first pictures of the garland in my dining room. I am going to try to get some better pictures tomorrow when the sun is out and hopefully the room is clean! :) We don't have a fireplace in our house, and I really miss decorating one for the holidays, so I make do with what I have and what I have is a whole wall of bookshelves with our "homeschool" hutch in the center. We keep all our books, posters, pens and homeschool whatnots in there. You can see just a glimpse of the branches that I hung on the ceiling above our table. That will be a separate post! Feathers and japanese lantern flowers along with the huge pinecones I collected while we were at Sequoia National Forest this past summer. When I saw them, I knew I had to have them for decorating this Christmas.

I love, love, loooovvvveee these sayings that you rub on. I found this one on clearance at Target ($5) woohoo! I think it looks great on this mirror that is on top of the hutch - - I also wonder why it was on clearance when it isn't even Thanksgiving yet.....hmmmm maybe it was just a God treat for me!

Oh where oh where has my camera gone?

I have just finished the most wonderful garland and hanging branch thing - - maybe I will come up with a good name for it yet - - in my dining room. I so want to post pictures, but it seems my camera has grown legs, so I will have to search for it tomorrow, but as soon as I find it, you will see pictures. It looks fabulous!!!!! Can't wait to share it!

Things always have to get worse before they get better!

You know how when you clean or organize a room, you have to make a bigger mess to get there? Well that is what I am smack dab in the middle of! I decided that my work room needed some organization. I couldn't find anything anymore! So if I am going to re0organize, I am going to re-decorate at the same time! Below are some pictures of the during stages. Keep checking back because very soon I am going to post the final results and I can say, it was worth the mess!!

Found three pairs of Jason's pants in that room, he has been waiting over a year for me to fix something on each of them. The craziest part, when I sat down to do it, it only took me 5 minutes to fix all three pairs! Should have just done that when they ripped last year! The old set-up. Can you see why I couldn't find anything or function in that room anymore?

Just another view to torture your eyes with!

Not only am I re-doing this room, I am also re-doing the kids room and at the same time pulling out all of our Christmas decorations to start decorating the house for "Tour of Homes" which takes place in three weeks. Tour of Homes is an annual fundraiser hosted by the post's OCSC. For the tour, there will be 9 homes that are opened up for people to go through and look at how it is decorated not only for Christmas, but what you have done with your home. Since we live on post in Army housing, everyone has the same general house, so it is fun to see how people get creative and make it their home. There will be somewhere around 150+ people going through our home. I will post pictures once I get it all decorated, in the mean time, I think I may have just stressed myself out talking about it! AAAGGGHHH!!!! I need to get moving and get out of blog world!

Another re-upholstery job

This is the before picture of a chair I just re-upholstered. The fabric that she chose to recover it in was absolutely beautiful. I wanted to keep it all for myself, but I didn't :) Here is the chair after. I think it turned out great - - sorry the picture is a little grainy I should have moved the chair away from the window. Oh well, next time!