Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

Hope you enjoy this day with your kids and family!

Madi and I as superheroes...

 Smiling superheroes...

 Serious superheroes...

 Love this one of the little boys...an undercover cop and SWAT

Another little girl at the party was dressed as Wonder Woman too and her mom asked for a photo opt with Madi. Made Madi feel like a rock star!

Grocery Sign

Came across this sign on Pinterest (if you do not know what Pinterest is, save yourself hours and hours of time you cannot account for and keep reading as if you never read the word).

Loved the look of this sign but in my kitchen with no white except for a little trim work I didn't feel it would work so I had to think differently. I found this old board in a pile at my dad's workshop:

Wheels started turning and I thought I would definitely want to use black lettering to pop with my black and stainless steel appliances. I made a stencil with vinyl and spray painted with black.

I sanded down the paint to give it a really weathered look and loved how the lines of the grain in the board came through.

Set against some of my vintage canisters...

I like it on top of my kitchen cabinets.

Halloween Porch

If I had my way, we would have a classic Pottery Barn porch like this one at Halloween time.

But when you have four children who have their opinions on what a Halloween porch should contain, we have to have things like an orange floodlight, cemetery signs, over sized spiders, tombstones and that messy, more difficult than it should be to make it look good spider web 'stuff.'

Oh well. Kids are what Halloween is really all about!

Little Owl

So...the owl is growing on me. I mentioned how I don't like owls but they seem the perfect spooky for Halloween. I created a smaller version on wood and used it in my kitchen table centerpiece. 

If you would like one, it is just $9.95 for a 12x12 size. This one is in gray, I will make yours in any color you'd like. Visit www.pineplace.com to contact me.

Featured on The Graphics Fairy Blog

BREAKING NEWS!

I was on The Graphics Fairy blog today as a featured DIYer.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK IT OUT!

Painted Pumpkins

Got some baby pumpkins at the grocery store. Decided to turn them into more Halloween decoration fun. First I painted them with my bucket of must-have-on-hand white paint (you've heard me say that a time or two right?!)

 Then I sanded them with very fine grit sand paper to take of just a touch of the paint, for a distressed look (distress pumpkins, is there such a thing?)

Finally, added some letters...

And after doing the same thing (painting and distressing) to some black candlesticks...

I found a home for them on the living room coffee table.

Harvest Mantel Update

 As Halloween draws closer I have had to step up the 'spook' factor on my mantel.

Some black gauzy fabric, more pumpkins and some lanterns have helped spook it up a bit.

I really like the effect at night with the candles lit.

Halloween Hallway

Quick post today...still loving my TJ Maxx table in the hallway and was really happy with how it shines during Halloween time.

Fall Junkin'

My blog shows that I did a lot of junkin' this summer in my travels. This was so much fun for my kids, I can't tell you how much they loved it (read with heavy sarcasm). So imagine my delight when I got to go junkin' this weekend with someone who wanted to go! A good friend of mine who I affectionately call Joey (her real name is JoLynn) asked me to take her along for a junkin' tutorial trip. I was more than happy to oblige and we had a really good time. We stayed pretty local and ran the Enumclaw to Sumner junkin' gauntlet. I have visited these stores several times but found one store I had not been to before and it proved to be very fruitful. The name of it was simply Country Store.

It is just a tiny little shop but had some great treasures.

And a few doors to chose from...

Among which Joey found her treasure for the day...

At just $45 for this vintage door, I thought it was a great buy. We have talked about some fun things to do on the glass panels. She told me she got it home and....loves it. As soon as she puts the finishing touches on it I will be sure to post a picture. Oh, it makes my heart sing, when a friend finds just the right piece for their home that they love. Gotta love junkin' love!
If you want to visit this little shop you can find it on the corner of Griffin and Railroad in Enumclaw.

Halloween in the Kitchen

The Halloween decorating is coming along...added a little to the kitchen today. These boxes I found at TJ Maxx are a favorite of mine! Most of the year they look like this:

And for Halloween...

Harvest Mantel

So owls are really in right now. I have not been able to bring myself to decorate with them though.  I will let you in on a little secret. I don't like owls. They make a scary sound in the night and can grow to be very, very large. And they just stare at you with...those eyes. Although their ability to turn their head almost entirely around does impress me. 
I wanted to do something different for my fall mantel this year. I wasn't quite ready to bring out the spiders and ghosts...and I wanted something simple. I was perusing The Graphics Fairy Website a favorite pastime of mine, and stumbled on this image:

Being as I do not like owls, it felt spooky but not totally Halloweenish and the idea formed in my mind what I would like my mantel to look like. I cut the image above out of vinyl and used it as a stencil and transferred it to burlap. I had on hand a painter's canvas so I wrapped the burlap on that and nailgunned it to the back. This is how it turned out:

Who-who loves it? (I know that was cheesy, couldn't resist!)
UPDATE: For an update on the mantel, click HERE

A Spoon Full of Sugar

I have amazing friends. I have friends that run marathons, run small businesses, are raising four, five, six children, which means an entirely different kind of running (usually in a car!)...they are all amazing women. I wanted to spotlight one of my friends today. Her name is Amy Allen:

She writes this humorous, heartfelt, beautiful blog about her family and raising six children and all that that means:

CHECK IT OUT HERE

 Amy is an amazing mother, woman, sister and friend. She has received some major recognition for her blog and a beautiful idea & tradition she started with her family a few years ago. I hope you will check her idea out and that it might inspire you to do something as equally fantastic for your children. Stop by the link below and leave a comment for Amy. Congrats girl!

CLICK HERE FOR AMY'S IDEA

Fail!

How often do you read about failures on design blogs? Not very often, at least I haven't ran into many but want to share one with you today. I think when we view blogs we get the Christmas Card effect. You know how folks like to send Christmas Card letters every year that highlight all the wonderful things their families have done and accomplished that year. Everything is picture perfect and they fail to highlight any failures they have had that year. (I admit I have sent them and will probably send one this year!) We know they have failures, we have all had them, but in reading them we see all their success and only our own failings. So, I am sharing a 'fail!' with you today and I hope it makes you feel better when things don't go exactly according to your plans either.

It started with another piece of 'The Crate.' I have made several things from this old weathered crate and next on my list is a large farm table for my dining room. This is what it looked like when I started:

You can see that it has plastic backing on it trapping almost 15 years of dirt, spiders and other treasures. I would have to first take off the cross boards to get the plastic off and clean up underneath it. Since our weather is already turning rainy again I couldn't leave it outside. I would need to bring it into our basement so it could dry out and I could work on it without worrying about it getting wet. I swept it off to try to get as much of the dirt and spiders off as I could.

Once inside I had a real task of getting the cross pieces off and ended up having to get help from my husband as my muscles just did not cut it.

 When they were finally off I was able to strip off the plastic and the tar paper underneath it to reveal the reclaimed wood I was after:

 Next came the sanding...

 And more sanding...

 And more sanding...

On a sidenote. You may notice I am in my 'nice clothes.' Something I have learned about getting things done. If I wait until I have several hours carved out to do a project, I would never get anything done. So when I find myself with even a few minutes of unscheduled time I grab a sander, hammer, paintbrush and go to work. If I am doing a particularly messy project I will throw on an apron over my clothes, but for the most part I have found sanding dust, dirt and other project byproducts wash out just fine. I usually have somewhere to go after I work and don't want to take (or may not have the time) to change clothes several times in a day. So...where was I, aw yes, so far so good. My tabletop from a crate is taking shape. I am getting it sanded down and things are humming along. My idea, I had gleaned from another blog, was to simply place the table top on an already made table. This way, I would not have to figure out how to add legs and keep the whole table together. So, I had dug out this table that had been holding unused decorations in my basement.

Upon placing the crate piece on top of it though, I was not happy with the proportions and realized I was really missing the huge chunky legs that I so love on farmhouse tables.

Not willing to give up, I primed it with white paint in preparation to distress it and stain it to make it looked aged, hoping this would help me feel better about things.

But in the end, it did not help me feel any better and I knew it was time to take a different approach. It was time to accept this idea was a 'fail' as my 16 year old daughter would say.

I love this picture. I think it makes me look like Super Woman. I am moving so fast I am a blur! Moving to get things done, make things better, make my home more inviting and 'picture perfect.' Awww, but look at this picture. My table design is failing and my basement is a dis-as-ter! Judge me if you must, but I love it. We are all real woman, we are not Super Woman. We have our good days and bad days, days when things work out and days when they just don't. No worries, there is always tomorrow. Go sit on the couch, turn on the TV, snuggle with your little one and eat potato chips. That's my plan. I'll come up with a new plan for my table tomorrow.