Razzle Dazzle Your Walls!

I am building shelving. Weeeellll... I am conceptualizing shelving. I have this huge storage closet in my apartment that is seriously underutilized and I want to organize it so I figure a simple shelving system is the ticket. So I jumped to the online shopping deities to help me find some contact paper (to cover the plywood that will be used) in nifty patterns. You know that stuff your mom used to line the cupboards with called Mac-Tac? Came in all sorts of hideous patterns and colours and stuck to everything? Well, this is my official plea to all contact paper manufacturers to get with the program and create a few graphic-ly progressive patterns? Please? We are breaking out into a DIY era of handmade and re-loved, and contact paper was created to be a part of this! Enough of the wood grain and bad florals already!

Every lemon leads to lemonade if you wait long enough, however. This is technically not contact paper but I am willing to redo my foyer if need be to get some of this into my space.

Behold...

The sparkle is from oodles of teeny glass beads that make a sort of glittery layer over the paper design. The pics above use the glass layer on only certain areas of the design. These below are just completely one whole layer of glass. I can only imagine how decadent it would be to do up a wall from one of these! So yummy!

Talk about living in a jewel box! They don't cost an arm and a leg, just a wee bit of your pinky finger. Hardly noticable for what you get!

It's Beginning to Smell A Lot Like Christmas...

I can't help it... as soon as the halloween willies jump back into the closet on November first, I start planning the Yule season. I adore Christmas and everything that comes with it. Even the family "together time" and the things like gifting that generally seem to stress everyone out. I am not a shopper, and loathe stores any other time of the year, but I find that I get so caught up in the entire feeling of magic that comes over me that it all seems good. I am the single mom of two high maintenance boys that definitely falls into the "on a budget" category, but I find that the smells and sights and sounds bring me right back to that sparkley feeling I used to have as a child and I spend much energy trying to help my kids find their own holiday twinkle.

It helps immensley that my entire family and I absolutely abhor malls and the like, are extremely casual and above all, have NO expectations. Each and every Christmas has been entirely different and that is the way we like it. I am the only one with a Martha streak and they pretty much let me have my way with decorating, provided they don't have to do anything other than "oooh" and "aaah". Truth be told, they all get into it a bit, even if they refuse to admit it. One year my sister took the ATV up into the woods and retrieved a seriously decrepid Charlie Brown tree that someone had cut down and tossed in favour of a new find. She hauled it down the hill and she and my stepdad drilled holes into it to insert random branches. One of the best Christmases in recorded history happened around that tree!

I am sure that most of this won't make it to my table this year, but one can dream. I have a thing for glass and although I am pretending to try to rid myself of my addiction, I will at some point add these to my collection. And I am definitely coveting the cutlery...

All of these are from Anthropologie (of course) and whilst looking up the (ridiculously low) price of the silverware online, I got to browse this year's adorable selection of ornaments for the holidays. I love what this store does and while I will most likely make most of these for fun, the prices are decent enough that you might want to think of adding a few to your collection. I have always given my boys the chance to pick a new treasured piece of their own every year, and when my cousins were young, my mother and I put together a picnic basket for each with a small selection of ornaments that we made with the intent that they could add one to it every year. I am all sentimental like that, what with the whole handmade thing, but you could definitely cheat with these. ;)

Just for fun, who has seen these? At $250 bucks a pop, they are not cheap, but they are so unique and well... artsy! How fun would it be to set up a table with a few of these! They are called "Captured Silverware"


Hilarious.