Christmas and a Recycled Wreath

Here's our Christmas tree this year.  We opted for our standard Douglas Fir that we've been getting every year since we've been married.  This was the first year that we put on ornaments that we had made as kids or actually a large collection of ornaments in general.  In the past, we've "decorated" with dried leaves, pine cones, and acorns for a "from the woods" look.  (And of course on the stair railing base is one of those great magazine trees.)

We also made a number of ornaments this year.  A number being made from leftover pistachio shells saved from our all our old biscotti baking.

 When we were going through our ornament collections, we realized we each had made an angel ornament with our photos on during the same year (1992).  So obviously, they needed to go on the tree together.
Here's my latest project in my quest to find ways to use left over milk caps from work.  A holiday wreath! (You can find other projects here and here.)
I used a wooden craft ring (12 inches) that I painted a green color.  One thing I realized after I completed the wreath was that I should've strung a ribbon or wire through two of the holes so it could be easily hung.  However, it still hangs perfectly well on a hook.  

Each cap I hot glued down to the ring form and then to create a "bow" I layered a few caps in the lower corner.  For added interest, I then attached various buttons to each cap center.  


And the finished wreath hanging.....

Grow lettuce, grow

So I love the reality now that we have our own backyard and can build a garden or whatever we want. We'd like to make raised beds for our vegetables this year. Our backyard is on a slight slope, so we're hoping this will help level out the yard when we make them (hopefully this weekend). In the meantime, we remembered an article we saw last year on salad tables and decided to check it out again now that we have space.

We used the wonderful directions here to build it: http://www.hgic.umd.edu/_media/documents/hg601.pdf . It's pretty easy to build and the supplies are easy to find all at Home Depot or such. A few things to keep in mind though. 1- Make sure the battery is charged on your drill or saw. We recently bought ours and this was our first project, so we never took them out to charge up. We had to wait a while to be able to really use them and lost our daylight time, which is why the next point happened. 2- When assemblng and stapling the window screening to the frame, it may be helpful to do this on a light colored surface. We attached ours down in our basement where there was a section of dark carpet. Needless to say, one of us accidentally stepped inside the frame and ripped the screen halfway out.

You will step on it or at least almost, trust me.

3- Make sure when buying the rolls of hardware cloth, you get the right size. I for whatever reason didn't double check the width and it ended up being 10 inches to short. This involved us running to Home Depot right as they were about to close for the correct size. After we got back, we were anxious to finish and #2 (see above) happened.

Aside for these minor setbacks, it was really fun to build. It was definitely excited to move it outside and fill it up with the soil. We planted 3 rows of a lettuce mixture on one side and 3 rows of spinach on the other side. I plan on planting more rows again in a week or two, once these seeds are up.


Halfway filled with dirt.


The finished salad bed!


Planting our rows of seeds.


Our markers for the rows.


Our spinach seeds, all ready to be planted.

New Home!

So it's been a while since I've not only wrote here, but also listing new projects in general. Kinsey and I bought our first home in October of this past year and have been busy doing various projects and such. We were pretty lucky in that the house we bought was in really good condition and recently remodeled. Most of the walls were painted in colors we would've picked ourselves. We didn't really have to spend time ripping up carpets and repainting the walls. Here's a picture of one of my favorite rooms (obviously this was before we moved anything in!), the dining room.



One room that is still a "work in progress" is one of the upstairs rooms. This room is to be Kinsey's craft/collage/music room. The walls as you can see were just a simple shade of white which kind of made the whole room seem a lot smaller than it is.




Yesterday we just decided to go ahead and paint. So we headed off to our local Home Depot and picked out a warm brown color. Here's a picture of one of the walls painted in the final color:




We're quite pleased with the final outcome.


And here's a look of a new design I'll be posting in our shop this evening: