Showing posts with label mantel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mantel. Show all posts

Thursday, October 13, 2011

~autumn in my home~

Growing up in Africa we had two seasons : summer and winter, with maybe a rainy season thrown in! So one of the things I really appreciate about living in North America are the colors and fragrances of fall, or autumn as I prefer to call it {it just sounds so much more descriptive, don't you think?}





Decorating with pumpkins was definitely a novel idea our first autumn in Canada! We might occasionally have eaten roasted pumpkin in Africa, but we certainly never got to display them in our homes!

Canadian Thanksgiving kinda snuck up fast this year {it was this past weekend} and so my autumn decorating is fairly minimal. I had my eye on white pumpkins this year, but they're not that easy to find around here...

This one is actually fake {shhhh}, but it's a great size, I got it to use in my booth at Fieldstone Market, now it has a home on my little chippy vintage chair in the front hallway.



I kept my mantel pretty simple, I love these white pumpkins with orange stripes, they're just the right size for a mantel, I'm thinking a mini garland strung on the mirror perhaps?



I did find a couple tiny whiteish pumpkins which I've tucked in here and there...







Outside on the porch I put up my {rather sad} fall wreath,
definitely due for a wreath makeover, the challenge is when it rains {often} this door gets very, very wet




a couple of gourds and a sugar pie pumpkin, which was promptly given some or other name by the kids. Why do they insist on naming their pumpkins, it makes it so much harder to actually carve them up!





One year I got minature pumpkins for all the cousins and we decorated them with googly eyes and hair and so on, it was a lot of fun. We definitely didn't carve them up, it's like they became part of the family!

Anyway, I digress, the porch : the boys asked when we were getting pumpkins for the stairs, like we always do etc.etc. So off we went and picked out more fat orange pumpkins.
I chose this guy, I like things that are a little different from the norm:-) Isn't he/she (nameless) a wonderful shape? I don't name my pumpkin.



The boys each picked out a big fat round pumpkin, my only criteria being they had to have a stalk and actually sit on the ground. It took a while, we inspected oh, maybe three hundred pumpkins before making our final choices!



We'd barely got them home when my youngest came rushing out the door clutching a sharpie and various knives all set to carve his pumpkin...

WHOA!!! slow down, let's just enjoy the pumpkins for a while (we're not into the halloween thing but they do like to carve their pumpkins)

I was given a bag of apples that weren't good to eat, so they made it to the front porch too. What is more "autumnish" than an enamelware bowl full of apples, especially when they have a leaf or two still attached.






So that's it for my autumn decorating so far, I like to think it's minimal but meaningful! Hope you're having fun with your decorating too! For a summer gal I find I'm quite enjoying the fall this year ~ all the gorgeous colors of the leaves and yummy fall goodies that get cooked up in my kitchen. But that's another post all by itself!

Happy autumn!
Tracey

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

~chippy paint love~

yup, it was love at first sight

i wasn't even shopping, not really...

then i spotted this chippy old mirror



i walked away...

...and then i walked back

...and then i finally went inside

it was a wonderful chippy old window

several layers of paint





with the mirror pieces already fitted

how could i pass it up?

so home it came

and i gotta tell you

~i'm still in love~



and while we're at it, here are a few shots of my spring mantle in progress

old books tied with twine



an old canning jar with rusty zinc lid 

i found these number tiles in a thrift store, have no idea what they were meant for



but i do love them in this old jar



architectural what-not



wire crowns with sparklies



two sweet little birdies chatting about my chippy mirror



a little bit of easter - vintage easter shadow box with fuzzy bunny



and a vintage mirror behind



isn't this little guy sweet, even if his eye has rubbed off!
little bunny egg cup in robin's egg blue, made in Japan




i have a little more up there than i usually do, but it's interesting right!

of course it would all look so much nicer on a white mantle

right hon??

mr keeper always gets a little worried when he sees me starting to move things around...

you'd think he'd be used to it after all these years

a little fluffing keeps a gal happy after all!

~I'm linking up with Kathleen at White Wednesday~

she's got some great chippy paint going on this week too!



Tracey

~don't forget to check out the giveaway on my sidebar~
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