A little autumn atmosphere (photos)

I like to move holiday decorations around in the house, sometimes even during the same holiday. We use a lot of the same things every year, but they end up in different places. At Thanksgiving I had a few dollar-store pinecone-leaf-ribbon things in a bowl and on the table. I don't usually go out of my way to buy things like that, but I was planning on using them later for something quite different. Which turned out to be impractical, but I still did find another use for them (see below).

The Thanksgiving decoration in the entryway was our two scarecrows, fake leaves someone gave us, and wooden canisters from a yard sale. (Real leaves are nice too, but they get crumbly.)

Today I changed it around for an end-of-October mood. We still have the scarecrows, but I added an oil lamp and the pinecone decorations in a flat basket, along with a (real) green and orange gourd.  What do you think?

(The rust-coloured doily was made by an awesome thread-crocheter that some of you know. You should consider this a hint.)

Treehouse snapshots: Easter Weekend

These pictures are for The Apprentice, who may not be able to  get here because she is under the weather.

Chippy sympathizes.

Front hall

Love seat

Working on the dining room

Dolls kicking back

Family souvenirs

Coffee table 

 

Lydia's tissue flowers on a vintage box embroidered with porcupine quills

Stained glass we have had for a long time...I just moved it to another window so we would notice it again

Ceramics my mom painted in the 1980's

We decluttered some holiday things this year, but Mr. Fixit wanted to keep the rabbit.

Now all we need is the ice to melt. (It's dripping! Yes!)

 Actually it's less dripping, more sliding from the roof with great smashings and crashings (to quote Lloyd Alexander).  Those things that look like broken panes of glass are shovel-sized pieces of ice. They sound like thunder when they roll down the steel roof of the Treehouse.

Mama Squirrel's Reading List, and a decor game

Currently in the middle of:

Alton Locke, by Charles Kingsley

10 Philosophical Mistakes, by Mortimer J. Adler (I'm only up to the third mistake so far)

Plutarch's Coriolanus

Shakespeare's Coriolanus

The July/August issue of House Beautiful, which Ponytails and I amused ourselves with one evening by comparing it with a flyer from a local bed-and-bath store.  (House Beautiful itself isn't all that expensive, which surprises me.  Some of the vintagey decorating magazines cost twice as much, which is why I hardly ever buy them new.)  It's surprising how many of the same colours and patterns trickle down from the Billy-Baldwin-quoting decorators to...er...the rest of us.

One example: this rug.  It's between $50 and $400, depending on size, which isn't yard-sale price but isn't exactly designer either, right?  About average for new stuff.  Anyway, take a good look at the colours, the pattern, the size of the pattern.  Then flip through a current decorating magazine or fashion magazine, or a sale catalogue, and see where the same colours and patterns pop up again.  Might be a dress, a shower curtain, wallpaper.  I'm wondering what that does to our minds, having certain images (that most of us don't even notice) thrust at us from so many directions.  Do we eventually start dreaming in "splashes of red against a deep black and rich browns?"

Flowers on the Table, why? (Hidden Art of Homemaking, Chapter 7)

It's at this point in The Hidden Art that we (any readers, but especially "Christian homemakers," since it's aimed at us) feel a bit or a lot overwhelmed. 

A familiar Proverbs-31-lady tension sets in:  not only do we have to "think artistic," but we also have to be creative decorators and make bed trays when people are sick and grow gardens and make candles and do needlepoint, and not just put food on the table, but pretty food, and search out flowers and decorate the table as well.  Flowers on the table, not just on special occasions but as a regular feature, and if we don't have flowers, trotting out to the garden for gourds. And we would never set out a plastic tub of margarine or a plain jar of applesauce or jam, would we?  Hidden art, nothing--it's us who should be hiding.  All this visual "communicating" sounds like hard, hard work; and what if it just burns us out, ends up costing a lot of money, and the people around us don't appreciate our efforts?  Anyway, they've never said they wanted flowers on the table.

I think Edith would say no, no, no, no, no.

This is supposed to be freeing.  Encouraging, not guilt-producing.  Remember the image Edith used of a broken body part in a cast?  We are being allowed to express our hidden-art side.  It's a reminder that we have permission. It is meant to allow movement, freedom, possibilities, especially after a time of feeling immobile, shut in a small space...in any way, physically, emotionally, or spiritually.

If our homes are already overwhelmed with clutter and stuff, or we have shopaholic tendencies, then buying even more candles and flowers or starting a craft-store centerpiece project is NOT a good idea.  What we need to work on, home-wise, might be breathing spaces.  The table and counters free of clutter.  Maybe ONE flower in a vase.

But others may be living with little, maybe in a small apartment or a government townhouse.  A landlord who won't allow paint or nails in the wall.  Not much to look at from the balcony or from the front steps.  Smells and noise coming in from other units, and from outside.  This is the opposite challenge:  starting from "underwhelmed."  And again, a little can be the big equalizer: a couple of flowers in a vase.  Something to contemplate.  Something no landlord can complain about.

And this is the deal with the flowers on the table: we keep hearing that "nobody" eats meals at the table anymore, at least not all together; nobody cooks proper meals, nobody has time; and the idea of sitting and stretching out a mealtime together, well...that's the most difficult of all.  Homeschoolers are usually a little or a lot better at this than most, because we tend to have more people at home; but even homeschooling families can get rushed and preoccupied.

So maybe it's not flowers and candles at all, because maybe you can't get flowers, or your spouse has allergies and the kids might knock over the candles and set the place on fire.  Maybe your creative stretching in the eating space is just nice cloth placemats, or cartoons drawn on a chalkboard over the table.  Maybe it's bright red or pretty blue paper napkins, laid out over the plates--I'm serious!  Sometimes a bit of colour is just what a boring table needs, even if it's from the dollar store.

But think about this: if the table looks a little nicer than usual, and the room is clean and smells good, and the food is set out in a specially pretty or fun or appetizing way (that's chapter 8)...you see and they see that somebody cares. Maybe we will spend a few minutes longer sitting there. Maybe we'll even try talking to each other while we're there.

Maybe that's the why.

Linked from the Ordo Amoris linky for Hidden Art of Homemaking, Chapter 7. (I checked this time! It's the right link!)

The Hidden Art of Homemaking, chapter 5: Interior Decorating and The Friendly Giant

This You-tube video, if you've never seen it, is a clip from the program Clean Sweep. Several years ago when we had a satellite dish, it used to come on right around the time we got home from church on Sundays, and the kids and I would get a quick lunch and watch. You know what happens after they blow the whistle? Everybody gets busy and hauls EVERYTHING in that room out to the yard, for sorting and a whole lot of discarding. Some of it, they junk--the dirty, the useless. Some of it gets sold in a big yard sale. The best stuff gets kept and incorporated into a new room design.



I learned several things from watching this show.

1)  Many of our houses contain several-times-over-enough stuff already to be beautiful, functional, and express our dreams, values, and individuality.  At church we are watching a DVD series with Dallas Willard, and in yesterday's session he stated that humans are "treasuring creatures."  Our "things" are important to us; they give us identity; they give us comfort.  As Edith Schaeffer says, they also give us continuity when housing has to change or life gets difficult.  It's not unnatural to want to have treasured possessions, cherished things.  Sometimes they remind us of people we love, or places we've been, or special times.

What Edith Schaeffer didn't deal with so much, around 1970, was the problem of Too Much.  She didn't talk much about shopping addiction, hoarding, or just getting stuck with a load of somebody else's possessions. The issue of creative homemaking for us now is often cutting down, cleaning out, detaching ourselves from enough of the "stuff" so that we can cherish the most meaningful, most memorable, most beautiful.  Charlotte Mason talks about using our will to make choices, rather than just accepting whatever default options present themselves; in making our homes more homelike, that would include making conscious choices about the things you want in a room, and what you don't want.

2)  If you're letting it get dirty, piled over with junk, even mouse-inhabited (like one Clean Sweep family's "heirloom clock"), then maybe you don't really care about it.

2b)  Honesty time:  abandoned projects and hobbies, clothes that don't fit, mousey clocks, big buying mistakes--let them go.

3)  If you do care about something, then use your newly-cleared-out space to use or display it.  On one episode, the Clean Sweep decorator framed some fabric and glued on treasured but hidden-in-a-box dried rosebuds.  As I recall, the decorators also found ways to display Scout memorabilia (after deciding that it WAS really important to the owner), and odd pieces of inherited furniture (ditto).  That doesn't mean that you have to turn EVERY dried flower into art, or that EVERY ex-Scout should have his/her badges on display (or should even keep them).  That's where individuality happens.

3b)  I don't know if this came up on Clean Sweep, but sometimes, especially with children, "treasures" that were once loved can be outgrown.  A good clue is if the dust on the model horses is now an inch thick.

4)  At least on Clean Sweep, a good carpenter seems to solve a thousand problems.  Once the clutter is out of the house, the re-do usually follows two different streams:  the decorator works with colour and the look of the whole thing, and the organizer usually gets the show's carpenter to build some kind of a wall unit in a family room or dining room, or a work island in a workshop, or a neat loft bed with storage.  Sometimes it's just shelves in a closet, or extending a too-small desk.  This is not to say that all storage problems need to be tackled with a router; only that sometimes the piles get piled because there is no good place to put things, even important things.  Backpacks get dumped if there are no pegs to hang them on. 

Again, even good shelving doesn't solve the problem if (as they say on the show) you're trying to cram twenty-four feet of books into twelve feet of space.  But it does look better than stuff every which way.

5)  The last thing I learned on the show, and on other similar programs:  that little bits of comfort are important.  Not having grown up in houses with huge bedrooms (and not living in one now either), the idea of having a "sitting area" in a master bedroom, or in the corner of some other room such as an office, is one idea that's not intuitive for me.  When I was growing up, we just sat on the couch.  But the de-cluttering and re-do shows do this all the time, and it's not that complicated: usually a chair, a light, a little table, a pillow or throw, maybe a bookshelf nearby or a basket of things to read or write in.  If space allows, maybe a coffee table and another chair for a friend.  Just like The Friendly Giant. (photos here)

Related posts:
What Can We Do? Crafting a Home (Chapter 5)
Treasured Possessions (Chapter 5)
Homemaking thoughts, Home-making blogs (Chapter 5)

Linked from Hidden Art of Homemaking linky for Chapter 5 at Ordo Amoris.  (Link Fixed!)

Thanksgiving in our Treehouse: photo post

All photos by Mr. Fixit.  Copyright 2012, Dewey's Treehouse.

Gift baskets and Christmas cheer at the Treehouse: photo post

Crocheted bells hung on the wall; Crayons added the angel.

Gift baskets for extended family members (who I hope aren't reading this before Christmas).  The baskets were picked up this week at the thrift store, along with most of the picks, pinecones, and other doodads.  The monkeys are handmade.

A bowlful of Christmas, to put on a table in the living room. The crystal bowl was a wedding gift. Mama Squirrel made the origami boxes from an old (thrifted) book of Christmas photos.  The ornaments and picks were all picked out of this week's thrift store boxful of stuff.

The four wooden apples on the stove came inside that red and green bucket that we used for one of the gift baskets. The brown angel box also came from the thrift store. The squirrel and acorn salt-and-peppers came from another thrift store several years ago--a gift for Mr. Fixit.

The dining room buffet, improved this week by finds from the thrift store--gold garland and ornaments, candle rings. The candle rings don't match but they're the same colours, so I'll live with that unless I can find something else.  Good Mousekeeping isn't keeping tabs here.

All photos by Mr. Fixit. Copyright 2011, Dewey's Treehouse.

Holiday decorations at the Treehouse...getting started

We haven't actually gotten any boxes of Christmas ornaments out yet...but we always have a few things put away in the hall cupboard, so I pulled those out and mixed them with year-round decorations.

By the front door...I know there's nothing on the tree, but it was a start.

Six little monkeys, sitting in a tree.  I borrowed the tree so you could see how the monkeys turned out...but they're going here and there for gifts.  After we took the picture, I got an even better idea:  each monkey is going to hold a candy cane.

Another view of the table by the front door.

The top of our buffet, just playing around with some teacups and dolls.  (Does it look a bit like Brenda's?)  What it really needs is some greenery, flowers, bows, all that dress-up stuff...but we'll get there.

What's in your hand? Post-Christmas thoughts, and memories

As I was saying in a previous post, everyone's idea of Christmas is different. And there are also so many combinations of people, houses and events that your ideas of what you DO on Christmas can also be very different--and can change rapidly from one year to the next. I never "spent" Christmas (as in "slept over") at someone else's house, but we spent most of our young-years Christmases being trotted from one relative's house to another, joining in with one aunt and uncle's plum pudding and gifts here, with another person's holiday-in-a-glass there (we didn't get any of that, if you're wondering), and with my grandparents' potluck-and-turkey to end off the day: think Whoville for that last one. Think noise noise noise noise, Dah Hoo Dor-Aze (can't spell that) and roast beast. I totally related to those scenes from The Grinch.

For years there was even a brunch at another aunt's house, although that eventually got moved to Boxing Day. My grandparents had a New Year's Eve card party for their friends (and usually kept us there overnight so that my parents could go out). And the country cousins had a big family dinner on New Year's. So although I remember my mother making all kinds of holiday preparations (baking like crazy), and my dad doing most of the decorating, I don't remember them ever actually hosting The Dinner on one of the actual holidays. In other words, I didn't get much practice at it.

And now it's up to us most years--not a very big dinner, only a few guests (sometimes only one, more often three), but we still want to make it special. Because it's fairly small, some of our preparations and ideas can wait until the last minute--we're not making forty napkin rings or anything. And I've found--because our Christmas Days tend to be kind of quiet anyway--that I actually enjoy leaving some of the table decorating and even crafting until the Day Of. (Did any of you ever watch a Rankin-Bass Christmas special with the song "Save a Little Christmas for Christmas?")

This year, a couple of days before Christmas, I pulled out a thrift-shopped copy of Corinne Clawson's Holiday Orna-gami, a small paperback that includes several bound-in squares of holiday-coloured paper for folding. I pulled out the yellow squares and tried the star in the book--not bad. The other sheets were a sort of dull green and red that tweaked vague memories of Christmases around 1971, in the era of lick-and-stick Christmas stickers (we used to put them all over tissue-paper-wrapped canned goods to go under a tree at church), crepe-paper-wrapped crackers with paper hats (I think they banged better than this year's dollar-store version), and mod-looking greeting cards. Maybe it was just that we'd been working on restoring the 1972 Crissy doll for Crayons, or that I knew Mr. Fixit had also bought the Squirrelings some vintage Hot Wheels tracks (we already have the cars), or maybe it was that 1973 magazine that Crayons had brought home from the thrift shop (maxi skirts, rick rack, styrofoam and metallic sunbursts)...but somehow my mind was back there with those colours from a time before laser printers, when church bulletins were hand-typed and Gestetnered, and posters were lettered with markers and stencils.

Is all that too much to fit into a few squares of paper? Or was it the other way around...anyway, I started folding those sheets into small baskets, and remembered that I'd bought tiny chocolate bars and Swedish berries to fill them. Those became our table favours.

On Christmas, when I was cleaning up used and unused gift wrap, I noticed that we still had quite a long piece of unused wrap in some of those same vintage-looking reds and greens: have you ever noticed that some of the Made-in-Wherever dollar store wrap looks like that anyway? It might be the lead paint (joking)...anyway...the paper was decorated with the word "Noel," and it gave me an idea. I covered our long table with an off-white table cloth (and the card table we use as an extension with a red plastic cloth), and rolled out the gift wrap down the table. The Apprentice fixed the paper to the cloth with some fix-your-dress-strap tape she had (it came in a vintage-looking package, which seemed appropriate), and we added our regular dinner plates (our good ones had too much pink in them), red paper napkins, the red and green baskets, and gold-and-cream party crackers. Not bad.

We still needed a centerpiece, but that wasn't hard. We put the candle jar we'd made in the middle of the table (remember we filled in between the jars with gold wire-type tinsel?), and The Apprentice took her pliers (all girls should have pliers) and twisted and hot-glued some more of that gold tinsel into a couple of groovy-looking little Christmas tree shapes, to flank the big jar.

And that was our Merry Christmas table: 1971 meets 2009.

Oh--you wanted to know what we had to eat? Turkey (and tofurkey for the vegetarians), mashed potatoes, canned cranberry sauce, frozen green and yellow beans (Europe's Best brand tastes better than fresh this time of year), crockpot stuffing, rolls, salads and pies brought by the guests, and a cookie plate. We were going to have homemade vanilla ice cream, but the cream turned out to be bad at the last minute so that was scrapped. But nobody minded much.

December is the Dining Room

Decorated by Living with Lindsay, and posted at Dollar Store Crafts.

Yeah, that's what I have to work on today. Our dining room table has been covered with the Advent wreath and its associated mess (song sheets, pencil crayons, Bible) for the past month, but it's time to clear that off and start thinking about putting some actual food on it.

December is Putting Together

What are we putting together?

Cider Beetles and Cider Reindeer, inspired by posts at Stonecroft Women of Katy, Elfster, and Chaos in the Kitchen. They're sitting on ice-cube trays because they wouldn't sit nicely on their backs otherwise.

Cost: Hard to estimate: a bag of oranges, brown sugar, and the spices...but you can subtract the insides of the oranges (you scoop them out before drying the peels) and the extra spices we still have on hand.

The DHM posted at Frugal Hacks with an inexpensive gift suggestion: a nutmeg grater from the thrift shop, some whole nutmegs, and a batch of something made with nutmeg plus the recipe. We were at a Salvation Army store a couple of weeks ago and I spotted a very nice cork-topped container labelled "Nutmeg." (There were a couple of jars for other seasonings but I left those there.) No graters, but I found a small one at the dollar store; and that plus a small bag of nutmegs will make a good gift for someone who likes to cook.

Cost: Grater, $1.25 (our dollar store has been raising its prices). Nutmegs, about $2. Jar, $2.


And at the same Salvation Army, we found a Large Glass Thing

and a Skinny Glass Thing

that fit nicely into each other

to make a candle holder like those we linked to previously. We decided to skip the candleholder glued to the bottom--it was big enough as it was. The dollar-store candle


was a bit tall for the inner tube, but no matter--it will burn down quickly enough. Mr. Fixit stuck the two parts together, and we added some sparkly wire trim between them, donated by a friend at our homeschool co-op.

Cost: Large jar, $2.99 (the Salvation Army is pricey sometimes). Skinny jar, .99. Candle, .50. Glue, negligible. Trim, free.

Photo Credits: Ponytails

Ring out wild bells

Inexpensive, too, if you use the Mad In Crafts version of a bell door decoration.

Thankful Alphabet: Another O

O is for out, out, out at Domestic Fashionista. I can't think of a better reason to declutter.