Merry Christmas Eve

'Two new-old Christmas pillowcases added to our bedding here tonight.  Chinese food takeout, homemade sugar cookies, and dear Emmet Otter are up next in this little apartment.  I wish you all a sweet and cozy holiday season.  ♥

August Sunshine

One of this past week's projects has been painting the little window-wall in the main room. According to the paint chip, this color is "Saffron Thread," but let's be honest and call it "Egg Yolk" instead.    

It changes in the light but is more orange than yellow, exactly as I'd hoped. When the walls were still bare post-painting, I wasn't so sure about it, but now as I rehang each of the pots, pans, and needlepoints,  the color seems the shade I was going for, after all.  'One more coat for the pots and pans wall, a tumble in the wash for the curtains, and a rehanging of the string lights, and this project will be done, in time to brighten not-far-off fall days. 

♥

My Dream Braided Rug (or Bargaining FAIL)

Click to enlarge.  ♥

While Mike watches football tonight, I've escaped to the bedroom to glue all the magazine clippings I've saved lately--mostly decorating ideas, some outfits, some quotes, a few recipes, some home/life tips--into my inspiration scrapbooks.  In tonight's pile of saved clippings is this page I printed and mailed to my mom in the summer of 2010.  I had found--well, seen--my dream rug on eBay and saved the seller's photos to show her.  If you click the above photo, you'll better understand my heartache at not being able to "Buy It Now" this rug.  Ah!  It is perfect for me--and a whopping 10' around so is the perfect size for under my table.  ♥  Mom had saved this page with some of her mail and gave it back to me when I was home in November.  Seeing the rug photos again makes me swoon, and rereading my note now makes me laugh. 

The eBay seller had listed a "Buy It Now" price of $850 plus shipping costs, but had set up the auction so it began at nothing and included the "Make me an offer" option.  I thought I would be crafty--I thought I actually had a SHOT at this gorgeous rug (poor naive little Val)--so I made an offer of forty dollars, thinking that the seller would say (s)he couldn't go lower than $250 or so, I'd make a counter-offer of $100, we'd settle on $150 or $200--prices that struck me as fair--and I'd ride off into the sunset on my magic rug.  I was already imagining the rug under my round gingham tablecloth-covered table,  Stuffed curled up in all his black and white glory on the colorful braids, patchwork cushions on the chairs, red Geraniums as a table centerpiece, and Holly Hobbie herself eating her heart out over this perfect, perfect rug.  On this wave of braided bliss, I confidently submitted my offer of $40.  The seller pulled my magic rug out from under me when (s)he wrote back, just seconds later, "I think you meant to add another zero to that."

My heart!  It's so silly--we're talking about a RUG, just a rug--but it still hurts.  The seller expected a STARTING offer of $400?!  Gah!  And why sellers don't just start the bidding at whatever they deem the lowest acceptable price to be instead of using the vague "Make-me-an-offer" tactic, I don't know.  I'd have never gotten my hopes up if I'd known the bidding was to start so high.  My heart, my heart!  I watched the eBay listing each day hoping that maybe the seller would lower the "Buy It Now" price or put it on sale at some point, since I couldn't imagine anyone would bid on this beautiful rug at those prices anyway, but--no.  Once when I checked it, the auction was updated as having sold--to a buyer who had simply bought it for the full "Buy It Now" price of $850 plus shipping.  And to think I had made a starting bid of $40!  Ha!  And moreover:  Someone out there has this sweet rug!  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  I hope it is well-loved and is admired every day, I hope there is a cat or dog cozily curled-up and napping on it right this minute, and I hope I myself find another just like it someday.  If I had enough space to work on one, I might, but I also wonder if, if I even had the work-space, by the time I'd buy enough materials to make a rug this size, if it wouldn't add up to a lot more than I'd want to spend on just one item anyway.  I don't know.  In the meantime, I keep the photos and my note in one of my inspiration scrapbooks and hope for "someday."  And I think:  Forty dollars!?!  HA!  Val, Val, Val.  :)

Happy New Year

One of the stunning old cards in Grandma's box of saved correspondence.  And one of my favorites.  A happy new year to you all.  ♥

Home Today

♥

'Til the Love's Added

I had seen this plate on both etsy and eBay for $20 and even $35, and both prices strike me as crazy, but of course, to each her own.  I myself loved this little plate as soon as I saw it last year (or maybe even the year before now) and instantly wanted it for my collection, but $5 is about the most I'd be willing to spend on a small decorative plate, so I bookmarked the listings and kept searching and waiting.

Finally, a few weeks ago, I found the plate for about $11 including the shipping, and that was good enough.  As Mom is known to gleefully shout out when "striking rich" at a yard sale or flea market:  "Mine!" 

I attached a hanger last night, and this dear little thing that captures so much of what I love--the sentiment!  the window sill!  a braided rug!  hearts on the curtains!  a heart on the chair!  heart-shaped cookies!  heart wallpaper!  a multi-paned window!  a woven chair!  an old-fashioned stove!  a pudgy cat!  a colorful pan and mixing bowl!  a checkered backsplash!  a checkered towel!  even a (green!) checkered floor!--will, at long last, grace my plate collection tonight.  ♥

It is in every sense a little thing, but it is making me smile like the tabby above today.  

Our First Three Christmas Breakfasts

I've  never been a breakfast person--I eat it every day, but I prefer to heat up some soup or make a sandwich instead of eating more typical breakfast foods, and I think my two-and-a-half-year stint as a breakfast cook permanently wiped out any fondness I ever could have found for the smells of bacon, eggs, or waffles--but the Christmas breakfast Mike and I share has become one of my favorite parts of the holiday.  It has been egg casserole and cinnamon rolls every year, and while the food is good (she says modestly), it is the table-setting and actual sharing of it that I love the most.  We enjoy a Christmas Eve dinner and a Christmas evening dinner too, but somehow it's our Christmas breakfasts that delight me. 

This was Mike's and my third Christmas in this apartment, and our third as a married couple.  I remember Dad asking me on the phone last Christmas what we'd had for breakfast, and I responded, "Egg casserole and cinnamon rolls--It's our tradition" and then laughing at that with him because it had been only the second Christmas Mike and I had done that.  'Quite a tradition!  :)  Our Christmas meal together before we married was always a belated supper  after we'd both returned from our parents' homes--Christmas 2011 was the first time we shared Christmas Eve, Christmas morning, and Christmas dinner together.  And it's sweet to be able to do that.  I had actually been scheduled to work this Christmas, but a coworker covered it for me, picking up some holiday overtime for herself, and Mike and I were quite grateful.  (I burst into tears when she said she would work it for me, I was that surprised and relieved.)  Our holiday together was extra-special this year, then, since we hadn't known until last week that we would, in fact, be together for it.  And this year's breakfast was sunny and sweet just like the two before it.

2011's breakfast table was in aqua with most everything on it a gift from loved ones.  The knit-look aqua mugs were from my mom.  The candlesticks too.  The lace snowflake tablecloth was a Christmas gift from my younger brother in 2010 and is now part of the tradition. 

Last year's breakfast table was pink.  The candles, trees, deer, house, church, and other little ornaments were all from Mom, Aunt Laurie, and (one of their younger sisters) Aunt Heidi. 

And this year's table was glowing and sunshiney, although that was an as-I-woke-up-Christmas-morning decision.  The yellow under the lace tablecloth was the yellow gingham bedspread I'd used on the table this past Easter.  It looked soft and mellow with the lace over it, which was nice.  While Mike slept in, I gathered the dishes from the cupboard and the ornaments off our tree that were yellow and cream, picked a couple yellow star sugar cookies for our plates out of the tin, and even found a lion and lamb amongst Stuffed's toys.  ♥  (Martha Stewart would shake her head.  That's okay.) 

The snowflake spreader was on Christmas clearance at Walgreens (drugstore) years ago for fifty cents or so.  :)  The trees and houses and ornaments and casserole dish were all gifts. 

Mom found me the brown deer at the flea market this fall and gave it to me last week.  The glass candle dish was the one Aunt Laurie had tucked into our cookie tin this Christmas. 

And now it is back to work for me after a blissful six days off.  I am blessed beyond measure. 

And it was absolutely a merry little Christmas.  ♥

April Violets and October Anniversaries

Today my parents celebrate their forty-third wedding anniversary.  In 1966, one of the young men my dad was serving with in Vietnam mentioned in a letter to his kid sister back home that one of his Air Force buddies could use some extra mail.  My fourteen-year-old mom dutifully put pen to paper for her big brother, my dad soon wrote back, and four years of Air Mail later, it was their matchmaker, Dad's friend and Mom's brother, who served as Best Man at their October 24th wedding.  "Some of my best work," my uncle brags of their union.  In four more years, my parents would name their first child after dear Uncle Dan.  As I like to point out to my mom, who is still upset that they don't have better pictures from their wedding day, her marriage turned out even if her photographs didn't.  

 

Before the autumn wedding and baby Daniel, though, there were those four years of letters, care packages, and rare visits home on-leave.  "I would complete soak all my stationery and envelopes in Yardley's April Violets," Mom always mentions when she talks about their correspondence.  She wrote my dad a letter a day.  Dad, for his part, sent letter, pictures, and love poems--"And your dad was really a poet," Mom always adds at this point in her reminiscences.  I come by my love of letter-writing naturally, I can't help but think, just as so many of "[their] songs" from the mid-late 1960s--"Crimson and Clover," "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and "My Girl," to name just a few--had become my own favorites by the time I was eleven.  My parents finally saw each other in-person for the first time during one of my dad's visits home.  High school student Mom anxiously waited at her parents' window in New York while my dad made the drive up from Pennsylvania.  "When I saw him coming down the sidewalk in his dress uniform. . . !"  Mom still gushes at the memory, blushingly trailing off each time she shares it.  "And I'm telling you, Vally," she always goes on, "I knew right away that he was a keeper:  My brother Eric was just a baby then and was playing with his toy cars, and your dad got right down on the floor beside him and started racing the cars around with him."  (How a man treats the very young and very old tells you all you need to know about a man's character, my mother advised me ages ago.) 

Perfumed mail, The Big Chill soundtrack of their pen pal days, and matchbox car races can make it all seem much more lighthearted than it was, of course.  "Come home safe" is written in Mom's teenage penmanship across the backs of so many of her old photos to Dad.  The scene in Forrest Gump that shows a safely-home-from-Vietnam Forrest reunited with his beloved Jenny is the one that always gets my parents, and being in the room with them while they watch uniform-clad Forrest and long-haired Jenny embrace after his years in the service almost feels like too personal a Mom and Dad Moment to intrude upon.  Their own love story didn't have to turn out this well, and we all know it.  Dad doesn't decorate family members' graves on Memorial Day without remembering the classmate with whom he enlisted and without whom he made it home.  

Tonight my parents will exchange cards and maybe catch dinner and a movie, while two of their grandchildren daydream about next week's Halloween costumes and another grandchild waits a few more weeks to be born.  The letters that started it all, still tucked into their red and blue-bordered Air Mail envelopes, have been carefully packed away since 1970 in my parents' bedroom closet, faintly flower-scented testaments to the wonder of true love. 

♥

Making Me Happy Tonight

Have I mentioned here before how much I love the little Art Deco-ish storybook houses like Hugh Comstock's famous "Hansel" cottage in Carmel, California?  I've saved images of similar cottages  in my home/decorating scrapbooks and inspiration folders since I was thirteen.  

The steeply pitched roof!  ♥  The rounded door and windows!  ♥  The stone exterior!  ♥  The crazy crooked chimney!  ♥  

 If I could jump into any of these illustrations, I would.  Ohhhhhh, I would, I would, I would.  

I've always found it fascinating that certain styles of houses simply seem like Home to us--and others, not so much.  The tiny storybook cottages--ideally set in the wild woods--make my heart ache, just as huge Victorian houses speak to Aunt Laurie and almost any small blue house will be loved by Mom.  

I love hearing about peoples' dream homes.  

In an old issue of Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion (aka Sweetest! Magazine! Ever!), a feature on a guest bedroom in Engelbreit's own home shows some of her collection of miniature houses, and the accompanying caption from Engelbreit reads:  "For me, a house is a symbol of everything good."  Yes.  And for me, a little Art Deco cottage, especially so.  

You know, then, how much I squealed when I finally found not only a vintage vase I loved for our mantel here, but also one that is a nine-inch-tall model of my dream house.  ♥  Look at the chimney!!  And the cute little window!  And how the exterior is even made to look like brick and stone!  It's the find of a lifetime. 

My patience for projects like the mantel makeover drives my mom crazy.  I'll go a year--or in this case, a year and six months, specifically--without a vase for it because I want The Right One, not just any one.  Still on my list for the mantel is The Perfect Hooked Rug for in front of it.  That search continues.  (This rug, in the fourth, fifth, and sixth photos down, made my heart beat faster when I saw it, but alas!  Someone else out there is enjoying it.  It's such gorgeous work.  ♥)  In the meantime, a vase is finally in the spot I had set aside for one.  Bit by bit, and find by find, it is coming together.  Look at the tiny lamps to either side of the front door!  ♥ 

It is a little thing in every sense, but let's hear it for little things.  :)

I'm a happy lady here tonight.  ♥