Christmas is Coming

It's almost time! I have finally finished my Christmas shopping, and am now working on wrapping presents. Here are some of my favorite Christmas decorations:

This is a ceramic Christmas tree from Scott's grandparents. 

I always wanted a Christmas village. And one day Scott's aunt gave us a complete city!

And of course, my beautiful nativity from my beautiful Grandma. <3

Sometimes I wish that the Christmas season would never end. I love being surrounded by the pretty lights and all of the little keepsakes that have been given to us over the years. 

Christmas music is more important than you give it credit for.

The spirit of Christmas, i believe, is highly dependent on music. Music sets the tone for just about everything in my life anyway. And this Christmas season is no different! Just like last Christmas, and probably every Christmas in my future, i've been listening exclusively to Sufjan Stevens Christmas albums. I find his holiday music to be much more in tune with the mood i feel should be present at Christmas time. SO to spare you (my 5 glorious readers whom i love so dearly) from having to listen to 99.9 and the same 10 obnoxious songs repeatedly, i've posted a link to my favorite of Sufjan's Christmas songs so you can have a little sample before you rush out and buy all the albums. Though i'm confident that will happen.

you're welcome.

The Ornaments

 Let's talk about decorating a tree for a second. Do you prefer the perfectly matched and fancy Christmas tree, or the messy sentimental one?

Personally- I favor the sentimental tree. Growing up, most of our ornaments were the ones that us kids had made in school for my parents and it was so fun to laugh and reminisce while we hung them on the tree. While my husband and I haven't been  blessed with children yet, we still value a sentimental tree. So our tree is filled with ornaments we've purchased together, or that were given to us by family members.

Each year we each pick a new ornament for our tree (usually after Christmas..) This year we are going to get a joint ornament and buy a new tree topper. Our star always falls off.

Here are some of my favorite ornaments:

I purchased this grasshopper from Anthropologie last year (my favorite store)

My mother-in-law gave me this ship ornament for Christmas a few years ago. (okay, it's also from Anthropologie...)

We have three of these tear shaped beauties. They belonged to Scott's grandma. I never had the good fortune of meeting her, but I feel honored to have something she liked on my tree.

My great grandma made this little pink star. It has been a favorite of mine since I was a tiny child. I had to beg my mom to let me take it with me when I got married. She has a few more, but this was her favorite too. 

Scott made this baby Jesus in his manger when he was really little. I think it's a peanut? At any rate, he brought it with him when we got married and it will be around forever. Unless it rots, or a dog eats it.

And I know you saw her yesterday, but here is our perfect tree filled with sentiment! 

Let the Holiday Season Begin!

Sometimes I feel like the Christmas season hasn't really started until we've found THE tree. When I was a kid this would happen soon after Thanksgiving because we used a fake tree (brothers have allergies... psh). So the tree would get set up within a week after Thanksgiving and we would decorate it and it would feel like Christmas for the several weeks leading up to that special day. 

Now that I'm married, and no longer live with allergy ridden siblings, we get the joy of using a real tree during the holiday season. This year we found the perfect tree at Home Depot. We may have made one of the employees cry when we took this baby home because he'd been eyeing it all week. (I say may have because... we left before we could find out) 

Here she is! Perfectly filled out, and exceptionally green. She's got almost a lime green quality to her branches. Almost everyone has asked "is it fake" the first time they saw her. But her beautiful perfume reminds us that she is not. And although she won't be up as long as some of the fake trees around town, she will make the season just a smidge more tangible as she emits her glorious scent. 

The other most important part of Christmas is the Nativity. Okay, in all actuality I suppose this should be my main requirement for the holiday since it depicts the actual reason for Christmas. Even though I admit that I subscribe, perhaps too much, to the commercialism of Christmas, I swear I spend just as much time sitting and looking at my nativity as I do at my tree. 

My mother collects Nativities. There was always at least a small nativity out at my house all year round, but at Christmas time the house was completely covered in them. I always loved helping my mom set them up. She even had several that were unbreakable so little kids could play with them. 

My grandma must have known how special nativities are to me, and she gave me this set the first Christmas of my married life. I have a plastic one from my mom too :-)

Votes

I'm trying to make decisions about how to design my dining room. I know what color I want to paint the wall, how I want to stain the table and chairs, the approximate shade I want to paint my concrete floor, and a basic idea of the fabric that I want to upholster the seats in.

(current state of dining room)

I know i want some shade of red/rust color, but I don't want it to be solid. I also know that I'd like some lightness in the fabric because the room, overall, is dark. I'm loving ikat prints lately and I think this could be a great place to incorporate one into my home. And I can totally find this exact fabric I'm describing everywhere if I'm willing to pay $20/yard for it... however, I am not.

I found this fabric for $8 and some change on Amazon and I'm strongly considering. However I'm not in love (but I think I could learn to love it), and I've had some negative feedback from a couple people. SO I need more people to tell me what to do.

Today I came home and spent way too much time on Photoshop making a really poor rendering of my ideas together instead of dusting my house. How do you feel about the fabric on my seat cushions (and/or everything else in the room)?

Update Time!

It was just time for a little update. I hope you enjoy the new look and layout of the blog :-)

Otherwise there isn't a whole lot else new with me. Just working on getting school finished up (I'm not actually that close..) and trying to make my home even more beautiful!

Family Room

Sometimes designing on a budget is not only tricky, but lengthy. It can take a long time to save up for the little things you feel like your room needs. We've lived in our home for a year now and I think I can now say that I have 1 room that I'm satisfied with. I THINK. I could still adjust the accessories in my shelfs and maybe add some pictures on the naked wall to the right of the curtains... oh and dust more.. lol but I have 1 room that I would say is done.

Here it is Before:

       

The seller painted all of the walls this very pale tan color that is just fine, but a little boring for me. Notice the wood baseboards. I'm sure they were the epitome of class in '79 when they went in, but they're a little worn and tired now, so it was time for an upgrade

This is what the room looks like now:

Hard to tell in this picture, but the walls have been updated to a grayish blue. I hung some fun curtains from my old house to frame the window. (They don't look that fun on here, but they have fun retro gold circles on them)

As I mentioned, one of my main decorating struggles is budget. Isn't it everyones? I LOVE this photo wall and I think one of the main reasons is because everything on this wall was given to me by someone I love. My brother is the artist of three of the pictures, and 5 pieces were given to me by my sister in law, and the little picture in the blue frame is a picture of Chewbaca which was a house warming gift from our friends Katie and Trevor.

I had these bookshelves in our old house, but our new house has a billion bookshelves built in. The shelf on the left was a light oak color and the shelf on the right was white. I took one of the doors of my entertainment center to home depot and they helped me pick a paint that would look nice with the wood. The shelves are not level, but eventually I will raise the shorter one a few inches and run a shelf across the top of the TV to hide those wires that aren't actually going to anything since we don't have a baller... um.... tv watching thing that makes the surround sound work... (?)

Storage boxes from when I was single and basically running a design office out of my bedroom closet (design school) make it easier to find video games and/or movies that we're looking for.

Yes, all of those books were gifts. I painted that vase a while ago with stained glass paint. I found the bark covered candle at the Goodwill for $1.20. And the candle sticks were a gift from my friend Jake's family.

I also painted these vases. These darling owls were also given to me by my sister-in-law. She's contributed several of the decorations around my house actually.

My peacock bookends are perhaps some of my most favorite things in my house, and one of the things that I spent the most money on in this room. I got them at Steinmart for $15. Please ignore that there are 2 copies of Treasure Island in this 1 picture... these are our most colorful/classy looking books.

And that's it! I hope you enjoyed your tour of the family room! My friend Shanda requested pictures of my house. So even though most of my house is not this complete, there will be more home tour pictures to come complete with the dreams I have for them.

Sometimes you make the wrong cake..

Last week was pretty  hectic. I felt like I was baking something every day! I had to bake a cake for my class at Joanne's on Monday and I also had an order over the weekend for 2 dozen cookies, 3 dozen cupcakes, and a star shaped cake. I hadn't ever done a large order like that where everything was needed for the same day, so needless to say I was pretty stressed. I make this pound cake that I really really love, it has cream cheese in it which makes it more dense and also a lot more moist than a regular cake. However, it takes an hour and twenty minutes to bake. Since I had to make a star cake I bought a star shaped pan and was just going to bake each layer separately. Understanding the time involved with this endeavor I baked the cake the day before I intended to frost it so that it would be nice and cool and ready to frost the next day.

I baked the cake on Thursday and was going to frost it on Friday so that I could deliver it on Saturday. I felt very proud of myself Thursday night and most of Friday morning until I realized that I had screwed up royally. During my lunch time at work I realized that I was supposed to make a MARBLE cake, but I had made a yellow cake. I was completely panicked for the rest of the day trying to figure out how I would have time to make frosting, color fondant, bake and frost cupcakes, paint some sugar cookies silver (using petal dust mixed with vanilla), AND spend 3 hours baking a delicious marble pound cake.

I figured out a way. And that way meant staying up until 3am and making several powdered sugar runs to Walmart.

The lesson? Review the order that you wrote down on that little slip of paper and stuck on your refrigerator before you start baking cakes. Oh, and try to include ALL of your ingredients in the price that you give to your customer so you don't end up spending $30 more than you actually charged for the order....

Here are some pictures. It was for an 8th grade graduation celebration, and the colors are the colors of the school.

And for the sake of remaining a real human to my 5 lovely blog followers (who actually already know me quite well and probably know how I live my life...), here are some pictures of what happens to my house when I have a giant order due.

This is my poor kitchen. You can see the main mess, but you can't see the satanic film of powdered sugar that is coating every surface.

This is my work station. I kept losing things while I was working...

Autocad is my favorite! I have just spent my entire morning playing with my floor plan. I want to (someday) move my kitchen into the room that is currently my dining room. I didn't get very far with my design... but its coming along! I've had a lot of fun this morning building my own 3-D cabinetry. Although, it's pretty standard so I probably could have just used the pre-fabricated ones in CAD. Oh WELL! It was fun :-)

The floor plan so far

A lovely camera view of the kitchen island (right), which will soon have a sink on it, into my family room. I cant wait until this is all rendered and beautiful!!

I made a cake

My dear friends Sterling and Leisel were married this weekend and asked if I could make the cake. I haven't ever used fondant, but some lovely ladies I know (my mom and my friend Melanie) have; and since they were willing to help me I agreed to do the cake. I think it turned out beautifully!

It's coming!

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Don't just settle for roses again this year, give your love something they can really enjoy! Perhaps some cookies???

I will even throw in a custom message from you to your loved one:

February 14th is also Arizona's birthday. So even if you dont celebrate Valentines day, I anticipate your order of a Arizona flag and Cacti cookies.

$15/dozen

Email s.stinocher@gmail.com to place an order

Let Your Light So Shine

The young women in my ward had their New Beginnings program tonight. I was sad that I couldn't be there (I had to work), but I was happy to be able to contribute! When 2 of my girls asked me if I could make some cookies I happily agreed and produced some delectable little light houses.

Doctrine and Covenants 115:5 Verily I say unto you all: Arise and shine forth, that thy light may be a standard for the nations.