• Celebrate - Decorating - Holidays

    A Kiss at Midnight: A New Year Celebration

      Spending New Years Eve at home doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate and bring in the new year with style!    We dressed the table in a lovely “Kiss at Midnight” theme complete with silver and gold accents, a clock plate at every place setting to count down to midnight, confetti streamers and of course, Hershey Kisses so that everyone gets a kiss at midnight! Sparkling Cider or Champagne makes a great centerpiece. The non-alcoholic grape juice or apple juice versions mean you can bring this celebration into New Years Day for a lovely New Years Day brunch, or let the kids…

  • Celebrate - Food

    Mardi Gras Celebration – Monte Cristo

    This is our biggest Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras celebration yet!  Though in all fairness, the most we did to celebrate in the past was eat on Mardi Gras paper plates! This year, aside from the decorating, and the King Cake and watching Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (set in New Orleans and gorgeous!) we also had a yummy Fat Tuesday dinner! Peggo made AMAZING Monte Cristo sandwiches, and we all loved them! She followed the recipe from the Blue Bayou restaurant in New Orleans Square in Disneyland (recipe below) and it was seriously dee-lish!  Though I wasn’t able to capture…

  • Celebrate - Decorating

    Silver Freak

    I’m a silver freak, silver freak, I’m silver freak-ay!If you’ve spent any time at all here at my blog (THANK YOU!) you’ve probably noticed that I have a bit of an addiction to silver, especially in the baroque style.If you are wondering how a person can collect baroque silver without going broke (pronounce ‘broke’ as buh-roke, just this one time so it sounds like baroque) I am about to share my silver secrets with you. Lots of the silver in my silver collection is from…The Dollar Store.  *GASP*   Yes, $1.00 silver trays (like the ones pictured here) can really…

  • Celebrate - Holidays

    Valentines Day Celebration

      Wow, these winter holidays seem to be one after another with very little time between! We get to enjoy the Valentines decorations until the 14th but then Mardi Gras and Chinese New Year are right after – only days apart on February 17th and 19th! So little time to plan, prepare and decorate! Anyway, back to Valentines Day – the decorations are up and the house is looking a bit like a cupid sanctuary. We went with a white Battenburg lace tablecloth over a red tablecloth, so the red peeks through all the openwork in the lace. There are…

  • Decorating - DIY

    Last Minute Christmas Decorating and a Flooring Update!

    I promised frequent updates on the hardwood flooring restoration project, but unfortunately there have been no updates to report.  Due to some big-time stressful life events, we decided it would be best for all of us to put this project on hold and avoid adding to our stress. We had planned on finishing this project before Thanksgiving, and it is now rapidly approaching Christmas. Anyone who knows me knows, I LOVE decorating for Christmas. I look forward to it all year – I am always trying to extend the season by starting earlier and leaving the decorations up a little longer than…