Christmas Dinner Table

This was our first year to host Christmas dinner at our house.  We had both of our families over for a total of 11 people.  I wanted to make the table festive and elegant with a lot of natural elements.  Here's what I came up with:

I knew I wanted greenery on the table, but I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to do it until I went browsing at the craft store.  I found nice quality artificial garland 70% off the weekend before Christmas.  I cut it into pieces, averaging about 12 inches long each, so that I could place the greenery more precisely how I wanted.

To add elegance and a nice ambiance, I used a variety of candles.  In the center, I floated three red candles in a bowl with fresh cranberries (bringing in the natural elements).

On either side of the bowl, I had a pedestal candle holder with a red pillar candle.

Then on each end, I used a bowl half filled with Epsom salt (to mimic a snowy look) and topped with fresh cranberries.  I used a small pedestal candle holder in each bowl with a white votive candle.

When entertaining for big groups, I'm usually big on easy cleanup, but because I wanted this to be a really elegant table, I decided to use my wedding china.  It meant more dishes to hand wash, but it looked beautiful!  (And how often do I get to use my china anyway?  It's worth the extra cleanup once in a while).

I wanted natural elements at each place setting, so I tied the napkins with natural jute twine and tucked a cinnamon stick and a sprig of fresh rosemary in each one.  I also used real wood "stump" place card holders.

Finally, to tie in the cinnamon sticks to the centerpiece, I filled four small votive candle holders with Epsom salt and cinnamon sticks and placed them alongside the greenery.

I love how it all turned out.  Merry Christmas!

Ladies' Small Group Christmas Party

I am in an absolutely wonderful ladies' small group Bible study.  I love these women so much, so for Christmas, I wanted to give back to them by hosting a Christmas party for them.  I had so much fun setting up for this party.  I wanted the table settings to be really fun, so I took some ideas from Pinterest and modified them to make them my own.  I love how it all turned out!

I used plain white dinner and salad plates to form the snowmen.  The hats are made with a plain blue beverage napkin and a table knife for the rim.  The scarves are made with two rectangular napkins.  I folded one to wrap around the "neck," and another to tuck into the neck.  Each snowman has fork and spoon arms, Hershey's Drops for eyes and buttons, and a mini carrot nose.

I found these cute little mitten ornaments at a local craft show, so I put one mitten on each snowman.  I just tucked the hanger part under and hooked the mitten onto the fork.  The ladies took their mitten home as a party favor.  Since we ended up with more place settings than people, they had fun looking around to pick which mitten they wanted.

I typically like to do name cards for company, but this was the type of gathering where I didn't want to assign seats.  So instead of name cards, I wrote a little message on the cards.  I wanted the women to feel loved and appreciated because they mean so much to me.

For dinner, we had homemade spaghetti and meatballs, garlic green beans, bread made in my bread machine, and a Christmas tree shaped chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting.  It was a great evening!

A Happy Thanksgiving

We are loving our new family room!  (Yes, I know I haven't posted pictures of it yet.  We're still working on some details.  As I write this post, my husband is putting together a cabinet that will go in the room.  Things are coming along, but it's not quite "done" yet.)

One of our primary reasons for adding onto our family room was that we love to have people over.  We really wanted a bigger, more comfortable space for friends and family to gather.  The way our house was originally designed, there was a small family room on one end of the house and a small living room on the other end.  Neither space was large enough to host a big group of people all at once.  Our previous family room was 20.5 ft. x 12 ft.  After the addition, we've slightly more than doubled the space at 20.5 ft. x 26 ft.  Already, we can't believe it wasn't always this big.  How did we live in such a small room before?

Since we love to host and since we now have a nice big room, we invited both of our families over for Thanksgiving dinner.  We are blessed to live near both families.  Not everyone was able to make it, but we enjoyed the holiday at our house with both sets of parents, my aunt, and my husband's sister.

Due to the family room project, our dining room is kind of a storage area right now.  So we decided to serve dinner in the family room.  We recently bought a 5-ft. round folding table, which comfortably fits the eight people we had over.  Some of my pictures of the table turned out disappointingly poor (That will teach me to load them on my computer and not just rely on how they look in the camera viewing screen), so they don't quite capture how pretty everything looked.  But at least you'll get the idea.

I found the burlap-looking tablecloth on clearance, and I have already used it several times.

I love decorating with natural elements and textures (hence, the burlap).  I bought the acorn and berry napkin rings on clearance quite a while ago.  Since they were in the clearance bins, I couldn't find a whole set of either type, but I love how it looked to alternate them.

I've had the tealight candle centerpiece for a long time, but I hadn't taken it out of the box until now.  It worked really well on the round table, and the glass candleholders are amber tinted, which coordinated well with the burlap tablecloth.  To make the centerpiece more Thanksgiving/fall-ish, I put mini pumpkin candles around the centerpiece.

Sticking with natural elements, I used place card holders that are made from real wood and look like little tree stumps.  I used cards that said "I am thankful for" and then added each person's name.

I really loved the table, but of course, what good is a beautiful table without a great meal?  I am all about keeping things simple when it comes to entertaining, so everyone contributed dishes to this year's Thanksgiving feast.  My mom and dad brought the turkey and stuffing.  I made rolls, pumpkin muffins, "Pink Jello," applesauce, crustless pumpkin pie, and baked sweet potatoes--most of which could be made in advance.  And my in-laws and aunt contributed to the sides and desserts, as well.  We ended up with a bountiful, delicious feast!

I'm especially proud of my pumpkin-shaped Butter Rich Rolls:

I got the idea online (http://www.thistlewoodfarms.com/simple-pumpkin-rolls).  I used my own roll recipe with dough made in my bread machine.  Instead of pecans, I used fat pretzels that I cut to the right length.  They turned out so cute!

In addition to having a great meal, I really wanted to do something special to focus on the reason for Thanksgiving Day and to establish our own new tradition for Thanksgiving at our house.  I got the idea from Pinterest to have everyone write what they are thankful for in a book and then add a group photo of all the guests who joined us.  I found this really cute book online, and I'm excited to make this our family tradition for many years to come.  It will be fun 20 or 30 years from now to see what we were thankful for in 2013.

We had such a great Thanksgiving!  I hope that you and your family had a wonderful celebration, too!

"Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever." - Psalm 107:1

Easter Table

This was our first married Easter.  (We are coming up on one year of marriage in just a few weeks.)  We are on an alternating schedule for holidays with our families, and this year, Easter was with my family--eight people total.  We decided to host dinner at our house, and I had so much fun planning everything!  I especially enjoyed decorating the table.  I love how a specially decorated table can set the mood for a meal--whether formal or romantic or fun and whimsical.  I love using table decor to enhance a gathering.  For Easter, I wanted to create a very spring-like feel.  I'm not a huge fan of traditional Easter pastel, so I wanted to use vibrant colors.  I also didn't want it to be too girly for the men of the family, and I wanted it to feel elegant while also being very fun and cheery.  Finally, I wanted it to have some unique personalization, and I wanted it to be easy enough to clean up (especially since a toddler would be involved) so as not to take away too much family-time after the meal.  I love how it all turned out!!

For the centerpiece, I used my Anchor Hocking cake plate, which is designed so that it can be turned upside down into a pedestal bowl.  I dyed 63 Easter eggs to fill the bowl, leaving the eggs in the dye for about 5 minutes each in order to get the most vibrant colors I could.  I used my wedding bouquet (silk daffodils--yellow daffodils are my favorite flower) in the middle, and I covered the base with silk yellow rose petals that were used on the tables at our wedding reception.

For each place setting, I used a round purple placemat, ivory plate, and purple napkin.  I love how the turqouise and purple go together.  I also found these adorable dragonfly napkin rings to put in the center of each plate.

I thought about using my wedding china plates, but for the sake of easy clean-up, I opted to use the everyday plates that can be thrown in the dishwasher.  One thing I've learned about hosting parties is that it's better to keep things a little simpler than to spend all your time in the kitchen, missing out on the gathering.

I also personalized each place with the guests' names.  I found some really cute potted silk flowers in bright spring colors for half off at a craft store.  I wrote each name on a foam Easter egg sticker.  I attached the sticker to a mini clothespin, which I clipped to the top edge of the pot.  They looked so cute!  And I can easily unclip the names and re-use the flowers for other events.

I absolutely love how everything turned out, and my family was very pleased.  Happy Easter, everyone!

"I don't want to go home!!!!"

We don't have kids, but we do have an almost 3-year-old niece that I absolutely adore!!  We love to have our family over for get-togethers, and I want our niece to enjoy these times, too, as well as any other young children who may come over.  So I keep a small basket of toys, books, and crayons in the family room.

 



 

Our niece goes right for the basket when she comes over, and we play hard the whole time she is here.  I'm usually exhausted by the end of the evening, but these are some of my favorite times.

My family came over recently to celebrate a birthday, and my niece, as usual, had a great time.  We ran around the house with a birthday balloon, played with the squeaky toy eggs, drew pictures on the Magnadoodle, and read a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse book.  When it was time to leave, my niece complained emphatically, "I don't want to go home!!!!!"  Isn't that the perfect response from a guest?  I hope all of our company enjoys being here so much that they are sorry to see the get-together end.

The Shady Rest

When I was a teenager, I loved watching re-runs of Petticoat Junction on TV Land.  There was something so appealing and wholesome about life at the Shady Rest Hotel.  The family wasn't perfect.  Billy Jo, Bobby Jo, and Betty Jo got into their share of problems.  Uncle Joe's schemes usually didn't work out.  And Kate, the matriarch of the family, was a widow, so clearly, life hadn't always been easy for her.  But no matter what was going on within the Bradley family, guests were always welcome at the Shady Rest Hotel.  They stayed in a comfortable room, enjoyed hot meals in the dining room with the family, and joined in on sing-alongs around the piano in the lobby.  I always thought that if the Shady Rest were a real hotel, I'd love to go there.

Granted, Petticoat Junction was a hokey show in many ways, but it was full of love, laughter, and family values.  At the Shady Rest, there was a balance between family life and hospitality.  The hotel, after all, was the Bradley family home, and Kate had to juggle her responsibilities as a mother with managing the hotel.  In the idealized world of Hooterville, she performed both of these roles with grace.

We don't live in a place like Hooterville.  We don't have a little train running near our home.  We don't run a hotel, and we don't have three daughters.  But home and hospitality are very important to my husband and me, just as they were at the Shady Rest.

When we married in 2012, my husband had already lived in his house for a decade.  It is a two-story, three-bedroom colonial on a 2.5-acre lot in the country.  It's on a dirt road, and the house is surrounded by woods.  I grew up in the suburbs, and I love doing things in the city.  So moving to the country was an adjustment for me.  We briefly considered moving--but my husband would never be happy living in a suburban neighborhood, and there are a number of things about our location that are very appealing.  Our house is a good compromise for us.  It's not too far out of the city, so the shopping, restaurants, and amusements I enjoy in the city/suburbs aren't too far away.  But it's far enough out to satisfy my husband's love of the country.  So we decided to stay put for the long-term.

I will never love how muddy my car gets driving on the dirt road, or the necessity of a septic tank instead of a municipal sewer, or the not-so-appealing well water.  But there are many aspects of country life that I have learned to love.  I enjoy how quiet it is.  In the summertime, the woods create a great deal of privacy, as well as providing ample shade to help keep the house cooler.  And when snow falls in the winter, the woods look gorgeous.

But even though country life has grown on me, there is a big problem with the house:  It was built in 1978, and much of it is still stuck in the '70s.  My husband made a few updates--took down some fuzzy blue wallpaper in the first-floor bathroom, replaced the bright yellow kitchen countertops with blue, updated the family room carpet to a neutral berber.  For the most part, though, he left the house largely as it was, complete with ugly old blue carpet in the master bedroom, a very 1970s bathroom vanity lamp hanging from chains, and family room curtains featuring brown drawings of Independence Hall and Mount Vernon.  He always figured that if he got married someday, his wife would want to decorate, so he didn't put a lot of money into design or decoration.  I'm actually quite grateful for that.

Before we got married, I already had a lot of ideas for how I wanted to decorate the house, and those ideas keep developing.  It has been a collaborative effort between my husband and me.  He is very handy, and he knows the structural/engineering side of the house much better than I do.  He's also great at hunting down awesome discounts for home improvement stores.  I do the aesthetic design--choosing colors, fabrics, type of wood, curtains, wall art, etc.  I love to think about how a room will flow and function, how I can best organize it, how to use color to create the atmosphere I desire.  And because my husband made very few changes to the house, I have a blank slate to work with, and I don't have to feel bad that I am undoing what he did.

As much as I love interior design in and of itself, there are two overarching goals that drive our home projects.  First, we want to convert the old bachelor pad into a beautiful family home that is comfortable and functional for both of us and any children we may have someday.  From the flow of each room and the organization of the closets and cabinets to the feel of the furniture and the appeal of the color, I want our house to be a place we enjoy spending time, a place that works well for our daily routine, a place that satisfies our definition of "home."  Second, we want our home to be warm and inviting to guests.  We may not be running a hotel like the Shady Rest, but hospitality is very important to us.  We love to entertain friends and family, so while designing our home, choosing and arranging furniture, and even organizing the kitchen cupboards, we are seeking to make our house function well for guests.

This is what this blog will be about--home design and hospitality--creating our own version of the Shady Rest where we feel at home and where friends and family receive a warm welcome.