The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for our humble little blog. This is pretty interesting. Thanks to everyone for your constant support over the past year. We look forward to giving you all even more posts/projects in 2012.
Happy New Year to you All !!!!!!
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,200 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 53 trips to carry that many people.
So, a few months ago in a junk shop I found a small flock of 6 of these clip-on mercury birds with spun glass tails. I was smitten instantly, they all still had their tails and a clip on a spring….but just couldn’t put my finger on what was missing with them….
Once I mixed them in with the thousands of ornaments I already have …it hit me. The matte paint was a little lacking . They didn’t have any “sparkle”.
No worries…..that is a quick fix.
Lucky for me, and the rest of humanity, Martha makes a line of superfine glitter….AND, wait for it, clear craft glue with a superfine tip. Now I can “draw” the glue on the wings and head. I didn’t want them to look too new…so I tried to only accent the original red and blue paints with coordinating glitter ( Garnet and Lapis ) ….and not completely hide them .
So….craft glue + glitter + time =
Way , More, Much , Better……. ( and they still look weathered and aged )
Last year after Christmas we picked up a several boxes of bead garland at Restoration Hardware, by far one of my favorite stores, but pretty far from my everyday shopping price range ( that would be Target ) . So trust me , I think they were about 75% off of retail.
I love the perfectly aged look they have , but each string has only one color and one shape. Pretty Boring. Since we got several sizes and shapes…and a couple different colors……we decided to restring them in mixed patterns.
So we cut them up, one bowl per bead, and restrung them on 28 gauge wire ….into 6 foot strands.
This couldn’t be any easier………..
Have you bought flowers from a florist lately? The prices are ridiculous. I’ve worked in a couple of the best flower shops in Dallas over the years, and I guarantee you that anyone can have professional looking flower arrangements from the super-market with just a little effort….and a few secrets of the profession.
To make the cranberry and rose centerpiece from our Christmas Eve party all you need is :
Everything can be found at a good-sized grocery store…except the clippers…pretty sure I got them at Home-Depot.
Whenever I’m buying roses, I always squeeze the rose heads and make sure they are tight and firm. I know it’s a struggle to pass up flowers that are fully open and beautiful…but these blooms won’t last very long in a heated house in December. Roses are always prettier after they have had a few days to soak up water and open the petals, so I remove the wrappers immediately to give the flowers room to open. A fresh cut is mandatory…( every time you buy flowers ) then I put them into a bucket of fresh water to sit in our cool/dark garage for a day or two….as long as the temp is still above freezing that is. It’s been in the 40’s to 50s here all week. After 2 days they looked like this……
They sell Norfolk pines as small Christmas trees, but I just use them as filler and a base to hold the roses in shape. Bet ya didn’t know that you can cut up a potted plant just for flower arrangements. Of course, I had to pick off small plastic glitter balls first. A ‘high-end” florist would never use Baby’s Breath or some other kind of filler…..I prefer the monochromatic red roses and cranberries with just a little bit of green pine poking through.
One good clean clip, about 10 inches down the stem is all it takes….
A few of these in the vase filled with cranberries and cool water is the start of the process…I rinse off the cranberries in a collandar first to keep the water clean. Just one mushy cranberry will give the water a pink tint…..Not good.
It’s important with all flowers to cut them at an angle, so there is more surface area to absorb water. This also prevents the stem from sitting flat on the bottom of the vase.
I cut all of the roses to about the same length and started inserting them into the pine pieces to make a dome shape… Be sure to pull off most of the leaves…because these will just rot in water. About 36 flowers later, I ended up with this…..
Pretty Chic…right?
I guarantee this would have been about $200 dollars at one of the florists that I worked for…
Merry Christmas
from James, Jamie and especially Harley…….
There’s a Christmas story in the “Little House on the Prairie” series where Laura and her sisters are worried that Santa won’t be able to make it through a blizzard and fill their stockings. After a series of 1800’s style tribulations, he finally does visit, only to leave each girl a tin cup, and an orange, and a penny. Are you kidding me? A tin cup? An orange? A Freaking penny? When I read this as a 10 year-old I was completely terrified. How could Santa possibly be that cruel? If the girls had only had stockings as “rockingly cool” as ours…they prolly would have made a better haul……
We use a lot of beacon blanket fabrics at work and I constantly save the scraps. I have been told that I am a tremendous pack-rat (read: hoarder). This past week I’ve been making Navajo pillows for the store windows…and each pillow I make leaves a perfect 10 by 24 inch strip of fabric left over. For Christmas this year, I thought I would make stockings from these strips.
I can sew a pretty mean straight line, but curves are a bit of a different story….so I go real slow. I started with a 99cent poly stocking from a dollar store and used it as a template for my own….
I used cream fur for the mostly red stockings, and black “Mongolian lamb-ish” fur for the black one with the heartbeat line. I had planned on using sheared wool or Mongolian lamb for the trim along the top…..but unfortunately JoAnn’s fabrics only had polyester carnival furs, (Big sigh). No worries, I can always switch the trim to real fur in the future.
When my brothers and I were growing up, our neighbors across the street from us had an 80’s style modern house that was so grand it was used as the back drop for a car commercial. They had a projection TV, a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and little wipers on the headlights of the family car. They took lavish family vacations to Hawaii and Vail. They held an annual Christmas party with professional entertainment. Every year, just before the party, these neighbors had a 12 foot Noble pine delivered and professionally decorated. As I look back, with 30 years between me and the actual tree, I’m blown away at the grandness of it. I remember that it took 5 men to carry it in the door and stand it up straight….and at least a day for the team to wind all the twinkly white lights tightly on the perfect branches….that smelled of minty fresh pine. It was just breath-taking, all gold and crystal sparkle, with every ornament professionally placed in just the right spot. But at the time, I felt sorry for them, there was So much empty space between the branches ……
My parents bought our family tree at Sears in the late 60’s. By the time I was 14, it was the color of very old cabbage and smelled like dust. It had bristly bottle-brush branches that poked under my fingernails when I tried to assemble it. The lights we just draped around like popcorn (with no particular color order) some pink, some red, some multi colored with tiny plastic reflectors, and some were injected into the plastic forms of severed Santa and reindeer heads. We wound colored tinsel garland around the ends of every branch until the entire tree was a 7 foot cone of mismatched foil sparkle. Our ornaments were far from a theme…more of an anti-theme. There were styrofoam clowns and circus animals that my mother bought at a “fancy” store when she was a newly wed, plastic sugared candy baskets that were almost too heavy for the branches, pipe cleaner limbed elves with the paint chipping off their faces, and of course all the “odd ball” things kids make to put on the family Christmas tree….(out of popsicle sticks, egg cartons, glitter and play-dough). After an entire evening of cramming the poor little tree there wasn’t a single empty spot of cabbagy green poking through the clutter…
…and I thought it was just Glorious.
And so the dice were cast…..
There are probably enough ornaments for a tree twice as tall….
On Thanksgiving night , I pull the mummy of a tree out of the garage for a through fluffing and to make sure the lights all work. She always goes in a galvanized wash tub.
Just like the bushes outside our house, the tree has 3 kinds of lights too …..white B-lights, red pearls that look like berries, and C-7’s that end in a bubble light on the tip of every branch. It’s harder and harder to find the bubblers now…I found a few sets on Ebay this past year..so I’ve got enough for replacements for the next couple of years.
I hang vintage spinners over the big lights to make them spin from all the heat. Inside the tree, I snap UFO shaped light covers on the interior lights, and hang the bigger ornaments that would dominate the outside branches. I string on garlands until she is dripping with them like an old dowager….
The glass ornaments I’ve been collecting for about 20 years now, They are Polish, German, Czech and Italian. They take a long time to place…even though they pretty much end up over lapping in the end (of course)…. I have about 6 tubs of glass ornaments, each individually wrapped in bubble, throughout the year. We have been keeping them in the master bathroom shower, because it is climate controlled …and we currently don’t use it (honestly, I don’t think either of us could fit in it, but if fits 6 tubs of ornaments just fine ).
The final layer is a coating of tinsel icicles…I love the way they sparkle. Not really sure how long it takes to complete our tree…but I can tell you that while we were putting it together we watched 2 Bond films, Super 8, and White Christmas…and still weren’t finished.
And how do I know when it’s finished?……because there isn’t any space left between the branches.
THE CAVENDER DIARY 