Magical Fairy Garden House

Pinch me, I think I died and went to heaven ... if so, they made a mistake, my mansion in heaven is made on a smaller scale than I am ...

Alas, it is the wonderful creation of fellow vintage lover and flea.o.logy customer, Joanne.  I follow her on Instagram and when I saw the picture below ...

I sort of flipped, I lost my dignity and begged for a tour ... Being the charming and gracious lady that she is, she consented.

Please don't think I was holding out on you by not sharing this before Christmas, I didn't go until just last week.  Fortunately for me she still had it decorated for Christmas!!

 The house itself is utterly charming, built for her now adult daughters, when they were children.  

The decor takes it beyond spectacular ... sorry about the superlatives ... I adore this sweet little house!

 Each detail seems nicer than the last!

 and these wonderful hankies and twinkle lights is going to be copied in my garden house, such a magical effect!!

 In fact I am absolutely determined to follow her lead, and add more vintage white goodness to my garden house!!  I just have to wait a bit, as I have an amazing photographer friend coming to do a shoot in my garden house for a project he's doing.  (Stay tuned for a fun blog piece on his work.)

The house is entirely lovely.  I hope to go back when she has redecorated and share that with you too, however, for now,

I will just share this picture with another setup that Joanne shared with me, of the off season!  Thanks so much for sharing your amazing talents with me and my readers, Joanne! 

Exposing our Brick Wall

Let the transformation begin!!

I been collecting pinterest pictures of black and white kitchens ...  I wanted to move away from my fru fru kitchen to one that is a bit of an industrial/farm house mix.

For Christmas, I told my husband that all I wanted was an exposed brick wall in my kitchen.  My house is 120 years old, and all the walls are brick covered with plaster.  This wall also had added sheet rock, tile and modern bead board ...

He spent New Years day striping it for me.  The best Christmas gift ever!!  I love it.

We also spent our 40th wedding anniversary, January 2nd,  stripping off the striped pink wall paper (and assorted older wall papers), before painting the walls a butter cream color.

Then we hung the cubby cupboard I had painted, and for which I had been collecting 'letter mugs'. (Anthropologie and Papyrus are great sources.)  I still have a gift certificate to Antrhopologie to get more mugs ...

The kitchen has four doors in it, amazing, eh?  All but one have transom windows that I used to put sign up!

Its come a long way, but it till has a long way to go ... we will be painting the cabinets white, figuring out something fun for above the cabinets, and tiling the counter top and splash with a small black and white tile pattern.  

Be sure to check back, and I will share our continuing project here.  Thanks for stopping by.

Fastest Christmas Scrap Book Ever

 This is the front of my quickie Christmas scrapbook, made today ... yep, today, in about 2 hours!

I found this premade smash book by Heidi Swapp at the American Crafts ware house clearance store in Orem (400 N. on State in Orem, in the old K-mart building)

Just $5, amazingly, not sure of the original price, but adorable!!

I just printed off some pictures and took them to work with me, along with the book, glue and a pack of Christmas papers.

 As I put the photos in the book, I made a note of what title I wanted for each page, and when all the photos were in, I used the computer to make the titles, printing them on a light colored page from my Christmas paper book.

 I went back and added the titles ...   

All done in just a couple of hours ... Now I have a memory book that took less time than I used to spent on some scrapbook pages ... Whoa!!  (I retired from being a scrapbooker when I started blogging, as it served the same journaling function for me).

Yep, that was it, the fastest Christmas Scrap Book Ever ....  I wonder if Heidi makes more of these with other themes ...