Show & Tell Friday - Christmas Silhouettes

I love figuring out how to get a look for less! I've seen so many Christmas accessories that I know I could duplicate for way less than what they want in the stores. One of the things I really liked this year is this Santa Silhouette Plaque from Ballard Designs. It's $49 but I made my own version for pennies.

What I really liked is the white silhouette on the red background - so festive for this time of year and different from the traditional black silhouettes. So I got a piece of red card stock and some white posterboard, had my daughter draw a Christmas tree for me, cut it out and framed it.

A Ballard Hack for pennies! I could have done the whole thing but I chose the element that I really liked. Wouldn't a white reindeer on red be pretty too! I'm thinking about making a little one of those.

This is a beautifully painted silhouette that I got from Suzanne last year. She's an amazing artist.

Wouldn't you know that TJ Maxx has a whole set of these Christmas Scene Silhouettes! Cups, dinner plates, the whole shebang! I just bought two plates to decorate with (maybe they'll be some left after Christmas).

For other Show and Tell Friday posts please visit Kelli at There's No Place Like Home

Black & Silver Cabinet

I added a few shiny touches to my little black china cabinet. Usually it just has white china in it but I really like the silver so I may just add a bit more after the holidays are over!

A big faux mercury glass ornament in a great little urn I found at Goodwill!

A vintage coffee pot my husband gave me for Christmas last year with some greenery in it and a few mercury glass candlesticks I didn't have space for on my fireplace mantel.

I'll show the rest of the dining room next week when I participate in some Virtual Holiday Home Tours. I think it's my favorite room!

It's been so much fun to see what everyone has done with their Christmas decorating! I have lots of ideas for what I want to do next year! Jennifer has a great idea for organizing Christmas, check out her cute Christmas Planner at her blog Fiddle Dee Dee !

As always, thanks so much for stopping by!

The China Tree

Hi everyone! Last year a couple of bloggers showed Christmas trees that they had in their kitchens filled with all kinds of fun dishes or kitcheny goodness and I really wanted to do something similar. Only I don't have any room in my kitchen for such a thing. I need all my counter space cause there's not a lot of it. BUT I could do something in my dining room!

I was able to purchase some little china ornaments last year during the after Christmas Sales. Not enough to go around the whole tree unfortunately. But I'm hoping to get some more this year after Christmas. I strategically placed what I had on the sides and front and supplemented with 4 demitasse transferware cups that I have.

I was able to get two Spode ornaments at more than 50% off last year and this year I have my eye on some Lenox ones that TJ Maxx has.

Isn't that teapot darling!
Planning ahead saved me quite a bit of money on this project - I didn't buy any ornaments this year. So if you know that there's something you want to do next year it pays to wait for the after Christmas sales and buy then (I'm sure that's what most of you do anyway)! I also finished up my black china cabinet and I'll post those pictures tomorrow. Have a good evening everyone!

A Birdhouse Christmas

I wanted to do a little somethin Christmasy in our screened in porch this year and thought a birdhouse theme would be good since I already have a few. I made the little birdhouses above with some scrapbook paper and stick on letters which I had leftover from last year (Martha Stewart Halloween glitter letters) and the unfinished birdhouses are from the dollar store. I only decoupaged the tops and back (since that's all you really see). I'll re-use them for spring/summer and I'll probably paint them then. I can just peel the paper off and they'll be ready to be transformed into something else! I like things you can makeover again and again!

I picked up some extra greenery at Home Depot when we went to get our tree on Friday and used that as a base. It's free!

Nests , nests, nests! Do you have any idea how many nests I have!! Thank goodness they're good for so many things! Here's a nest of Christmas balls.

This is my favorite birdhouse! It's made of odds and ends of different things.

I also put up one of our fake Christmas trees in the porch but I'm not sure I'm going to decorate it. It's already pre-strung with lights so it'll look pretty at night when we're sitting in our dining room and look out. I'll rummage around and see what I have - I think I have some grapevine. That might look nice and natural on it. I might try to buy some bird ornaments or pinecone ornaments at the end of clearance sales this year to use next year on it. Or maybe I could pick up some pinecones when I walk Maxie tomorrow and do something with them (I really don't need another project). Do you see how my mind works!

I just have a few odds and ends left to do plus the dining room decorations and then I'm done, done done!!

I've been meaning to show a picture of this for a few weeks and keep forgetting. Look at what landed in our yard

Is that a Heron? Anyway, it was huge! My pond has sprung some leaks caused by the bane of my existence - chipmunks! Yes, they have made nests or tunnels under or around my pond! We've found one hole but there's another behind or under the waterfall so now we're taking the whole thing apart (didn't I say I don't need another project though!).

I just want to say thank you to all of you who stop by and visit and leave me comments (even though I'm mortifyingly (is that a word?) behind in visiting your blogs). I truly appreciate the effort especially now that everyone's so busy with their own things.

Frugal Doings This Week

Dug up the last of my potato crop

First, one of my friends lost her house that she bought 5 years ago. She's a single mom of two boys - one in college. She bought this house as an investment and got one of those adjustable rate mortgages. Not unusual at all for the Atlanta area because buying and flipping houses was quite the thing up until about a year ago. Everyone's house appreciated tremendously in this area and I guess few people saw that it would all come to a crashing halt one day. So her intention was just to refinance or sell her house. She knew the type of mortgage she was getting, but frankly, people have always been able to refinance or sell their homes around here. Her house was on the market for a year - no buyers. As a matter of fact, she was in a new subdivision and they never got around to finishing Phase 3 cause the builder ran out of money! Her mortgage payment ballooned to $2500 a month this summer. She has a steady job but there's no way that she (or many of us) could afford that kind of mortgage. She tried 3 different organizations that are supposed to be set up to help with this situation but it came down to the fact that her mortgage lender just didn't want to work with her. Even up to a few weeks ago with so much media coverage about how banks are re-writing mortgages. Her mortgage lender didn't want to work with her - so she lost her house and now she has a foreclosure on her credit report. A friend is letting her rent a townhouse for the time being because it's almost impossible to rent a decent apartment around here unless you have passable credit. Her son has to start a new school in January because the townhouse is in a different town and he was having problems in school as it was. It's all very sad. She's very discouraged. She really feels like a failure. She said it's hard trying to do everything on your own. You only have yourself to depend on should something happen financially.

I can't stress enough the importance of having an emergency fund! These are scary times. Recession, depression, whatever.....I've never lived through such turbulent times. Since my husband is in retail (and we all know how well that sector is doing), we're really not sure what the future holds. Will he still have a job after the holidays? Will his company be able to survive in this economic climate (we hope so)? I've loved being a stay at home Mom but it's times like this when I wonder if it wouldn't had been better if I worked also. At least if one of us loses a job at least the other would hopefully still have one. If he loses his job - that's it! So our only safety net is to have a savings nest egg built up to tide us over.

clipped and organized this stack of coupons

I think most of us are doing the really big things to save money like shop with coupons or buy generic, turn down the thermostat, hang laundry, cook from scratch. But little things here and there can add up, especially when you've taken the main things as far as you can go. Here a few little things to try to save money:

1. Keep taking things down a bit, try two eggs instead of three, 3/4 of a stick of butter instead of the whole stick (I've never noticed the difference), reduce the amount of dishwasher detergent, shampoo etc.
2. I cut open all tubes and bottles to get that last bit out. You'd be surprised how much is left!
3. Use your imagination before you use your money!
4. When a fruit or vegetable is sold at a flat price say $3 a bag I always weigh several bags since they don't all weigh the same. Some will weigh more than others. Same if lettuce is by the head I look for the biggest one. Bananas I usually buy the smaller bananas because the large ones don't get all eaten.
5. Be careful about paying for bank fees. Know which ATMs you can use without charge
6. Know when your library books & movies are due back so you don't have to pay a late fee.
7. Save your change and either roll it yourself to deposit into a savings account or take it to a Coin Star machine and then deposit it.
8. Look at what you can sell to make some extra cash. Can you make something to sell on Etsy or ebay? I sold a few things about a month ago on ebay and made enough money to buy some Christmas presents on ebay. Do you have a collection that you could sell? I have some Mackenzie-Childs pieces I'm thinking about selling and you know I have tons of transferware that I could sell.
9. Take advantage of those drugstore gift cards if you transfer a prescription. I can't tell you how many times I've changed my prescriptions from pharmacy to pharmacy. They don't seem to care. Deposit the money you save by using the Gift Card.
10. Try to stay healthy - WASH YOUR HANDS! In addition to the usual hand washing I wash my hands when I come home from any kind of shopping . I've gone so far as to wipe down my groceries before I put them away when I've had a bagger or checker that obviously has a cold! Get some exercise and drink some water. Our medical co-pays have gone up considerably from last year. So even though we can go to the doctor if we're sick - it's money saved if we don't.
11. All those little trips to the thrift store, Target and Wal-Mart add up. No matter how cheap you're getting something, if you don't have any savings -that should be your first priority!

This week I also took the leftover turkey in the freezer and made turkey soup for dinner (we'll have the leftover soup for lunch today even though it's not our favorite soup - it's food). I baked some pumpkin bread and oatmeal cookies for afternoon snack. We've put out our outdoor lights but we're only lighting them from 5-9 instead of until midnight like we used to. We had a huge discussion about the lights - I didn't want to do them at all but my husband really felt that it would be a benefit to our community to do so. People always tell us how much they love the lights and bring their kids to see the animated deer and all. So that was our compromise 4 hours instead of 7 and we turn them off the day after Christmas instead of leaving them on into January. Can't say I had a marvelously frugal week, what about you?

What small money saving things have you done this past week?

A Sparkly Christmas Fireplace Mantel

Hi everyone! After trying many different things, I finally finished my fireplace mantel yesterday. I just had to stop messing with it after a while and move on.

This year I decided to hang a glittery star above the mantel. So I spray painted a tin star that I've had white - Ivory Bisque actually. I got several cans of Ivory Bisque about a year ago on clearance at Home Depot - you can never have too much white or black spray paint!

After it was dry I sprayed it with spray adhesive and added some Martha Stewart Mica Flakes. But that didn't make it glittery enough for me so I then sprayed it with some more spray adhesive and added some silver glitter.

The green glittery "Noel" sign is from that dollar section at Target - $2.50. and the cones on either side of it are from the Dollar Tree - $1 each. The other stuff I had from last year and I used some of my faux mercury glass.

I don't know about you, but my house is a huge mess! I've got boxes of decorations all over, 1/2 worked on projects laying around, and too much to do and too little time do it! I'd like to spend the weekend getting control over this mess but we're putting up our outdoor lights this weekend and we do a lot of lights. My husband would like our house to be seen from outerspace!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Christmas Past

I've been working on my mantel in the living room and thought I'd take a look at what I did last year to get some ideas. I thought some of you (especially my new readers) might like to see also.

My very favorite thing that I did last year was to wrap a painting I had hanging over the fireplace to look like a present!

I took one of those Styrofoam cones (they have them for $1 at Dollar Tree) and wrapped a strand of beaded garland around it. I may try that again with some silver garland

Vintage buttons glued onto a Styrofoam cone. I've seen cones everywhere this year. Lots seem to have paper on them. So maybe using scrapbook paper on them would be fun this year.

Boy this poor bird has been painted sooo many times! She's sitting on nest made from a napkin ring I think.

A silver tray with some broken mercury glass ornaments, vintage brooches, sparkly garland, shiny odds and ends.

Sparkly napkin rings in a bowl - gotta find those for this year!

The next few pics are in the kitchen - I'm not doing anything in the kitchen this year.

White and green fresh flowers surrounded by white and lime green Christmas balls

O.K. back to work! Enjoy the pictures comments are off - See ya Friday!