Tobacco Basket

I'm aware that not all of my readers are Southern, bless your yankee hearts.  ;)  Kidding.  You know I love y'all.  So first, a quick Vocabulary Lesson.

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Tobacco Basket-   once the tobacco leaves were dried out, they were bunched and bound together then loaded onto a tobacco basket so that they could be displayed and sold at the market

Pack House-  a barn where the tobacco leaves were hung to dry

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About two months ago, I came into possession of an antique tobacco basket.  This particular tobacco basket came out of my great grandmother's pack house.  They had a lot of tobacco baskets, but there is a really good chance that my grandma, my great aunts, and even my dad have used my tobacco basket.  It even has the name of our town spray painted onto the side.   

How beautiful is she?!  

You might think that tobacco baskets are boys...but they're actually girls.  :)  Or at least this one is.  Because she is gorgeous.  

My great aunt and uncle found this in December and gave it to me, knowing my love for all things vintage and historical.  I have a particularly strong love affair with anything considered a family heirloom or sentimental.  I jumped up and down with excitement when I first saw this tobacco basket.  It is old.  It is quirky.  It is not a typical home decoration.  It is big and chunky.  It is heavy.  It's magnificent.  It represents how far my family has come - from shuckin' tobacco to owning a factory.  After almost two months exactly, I finally found a place for the basket.  I've moved it all around.  It's hung on one wall, leaned against two, and finally...

I hung her up yesterday!  She's hanging in the kitchen, which I love because I get to look at her all the time.

When we moved into this house, the house I grew up in, it was still full of stuff.  All of the walls have nails and hooks and hangers already...the tricky part is finding the right hanger for your project.  I finally found TWO heavy duty hooks that were already in the walls!  They were hiding behind a picture of us that my parents put on the wall while we were on our honeymoon, so we didn't know that what the picture was hung on.  The two heavy duty hooks are perfect for a tobacco basket, which is quite heavy.

Another thing...when I lived here with my parents, they never used their front door.  We always came inside through the mudroom because the garage is connected to it.  They always had their friends come up that way, too.  When Mr. Robinson and I moved in, we decided to put the pretty front door & foyer space to good use.  People rarely come over at all, but when they do we condition them to use the front door.  Sometimes, people still come up to the side door and enter through the mudroom - which I always hated.  BUT... now I won't be hating it as much because when they walk through the door, this is what they'll see: 

  

So, that's how I added a little bit of flair to our home this weekend.  What's your idea of a good, unique way to decorate your home or let your sense of style shine through?  

Thanks for reading! 

DIY Christmas Centerpiece

I got my inspiration for this little project from Pinterest, of course.  :)  If you've been poking around and looking for Christmas decor ideas, you've probably seen this pin or something similar:

Source: google.com via Erin on Pinterest

One night last week, my husband and I had pork chops for dinner by candlelight.  There was no occasion, I just wanted to do something a little extra special for my hard working man.  The food turned out pretty amazing, if I do say so my self.  For all you foodies out there, you're a girl after my own heart :) and you can read all about the food by clicking here.  In the post, I mention the centerpiece.

There are 5 things I love about the centerpiece I created.

1. It was very festive and Christmassy :)
2. It took all of 3 minutes 
3. I spent no money - I already had all of this stuff just lying around the house
4. It is simple and not too busy
5. It's a little bit different, and we like different.  :)

So, let's have a look.

It started with a small-ish round table for 4.  We usually eat in the living room in front of the tv.  It's horrible, I know.  I wish we didn't...but for some reason, it always happens.  Probably because this table is usually the crap-collector.  Ugh.  Anyway, moving on.  I cleaned off the table and made the centerpiece and set it up for us to dine there together.  Let's check out the pacifics specifics.  ;)

• Three Wine Glasses 
• One Pillar Candle
• One Green Bow
• One Large Gold Ornament
• One Small Red Ornament
• Two Tea Light Cnadles
• One 2-ft long strand of {cheap, ugly, and fake} garland

I won't waste your time explaining each step to you.  I think the pictures tell a pretty good story.  The wine glass with the gold ball on top is taller than the rest.  It's from a different set.  But I'll just stop talking now and let the pictures tell the story.  At the end, tell me what you think.  :)

So?  Comments, questions, opinions?  I'm totally game.  :)
Have you done anything similar?  Leave me a link!  XOs.

Kitchen Projects

I apologize for the low quality of this picture.  But I added cork squares to the inside of my cabinets.  I'll use it to post recipes :)  The cork squares are hung with indoor mounting tape.  Four squares of tape per cork board.  The cork square on the left... has yarn wrapped around two thumb tages to make a "clothes line" and I've hung up a recipe for Nutella breakfast muffins (stroke!) with tiny baby-sizes clothes pins.

I made this from an old, boring picture frame that was sitting in my craft room staring at me.....begging me to make it beautiful.  Here are the steps I took..

1. I gathered my raw supplies.
1. One old, boring picture frame
2. One fat-quarter of red fabric
3. Folk Art Acrylic Paint in "Aqua" and a paintbrush, obviously
4. Hot glue gun & glue sticks
5. Fabric glue
6. One knife, one spoon, and one fork.  I just got married and we received brand new, very pretty silverware as a wedding gift!  I still have the old, ugly, cheap silverware from my apartment.  I'm going to slowly incorporate them into our kitchen decor, so I've been saving them.  I grabbed three of those to paint.  
2. I painted the silverware first.  Two coats did the trick.  I also took a short-cut and only painted the fronts.  :)
3. I painted the frame.  The frame took about three coats to make it look smooth and even, but how many coats of paint you need will depend on what kind of frame you're painting. 
4. I wrapped the protective glass that comes that picture frames in red fabric.  I used fabric glue to keep the fabric pulled taut across the glass.
5. I let all of this stuff dry overnight.  This is not necessary..it only takes about thirty minutes at the most, but since I was going to be gluing things down and handling all of the stuff..I wanted to make sure the paint was extra dry.  The last thing I need is fingerprint-tainted-paint.  ;)
6. This morning, I put the frame together.  It took about 30 seconds to hot glue the utensils to the fabric. I let the glue dry and harden for about five minutes before I stood the picture frame up.  Ta-da!  Adorable decor in 6 simple steps.

Becoming Organized

Getting organized is such an exciting thing for me - for US!  It is exciting because it means we are finally getting settled in.  I know that probably sounds a little crazy, but it is the truth.  I don't know how all of you function in society, but I'll tell you how I function.  The first time around, I just do everything as quickly as possible to get it done.  The first goal is to complete the task at hand.  When we were moving, the goal was to just unpack everything and make the house look good.  I didn't care where we put things, I didn't care what the closets or cabinets looked like so long as our living space was open and uncluttered.  No moving boxes in sight = a happy Mrs. Robinson.  After I've complete Goal #1, I move to Goal #2.  I organize.  I gradually begin to pull everything out of the closets and corners and cabinets (oh, my!) so that I can put things in their proper location.

Well, just last night my husband and I started to pull things out and organize all of the stuff we had hidden & stashed in random places.  It will take some time, but we started.  THIS MEANS that we are done moving!  :-D

HOW EXCITING!!

Holiday Planing & A Bittersweet Day

Today was super busy.  We got up early, as usual.  I'm not sure about you guys but it seems like the older I get, the more sleep I need but the less sleep I get.  Hmph.  Anyway, the first thing we did this morning  was make our plan for the holidays!  Yep!  We did it!  We finally sat down, toughed it out, and decided where we would be on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day.  It went much better than I expected.

So, then we get going into the big city of ******** this morning!  The Mister and I are both still under separate leases for apartments in the city.  We head on over to Mr. R's apartment and met his parents.  They brought their horse trailer and were sweet enough to help us move all of the furniture out of Mr. R's apartment.  All of the furniture in his apartment belonged to his parents, so it did make sense for them to come take it back.  :) After we finished with that, we went to my apartment to give it a final deep-cleaning.

THEN we went to Wal-Mart to do some very necessary grocery shopping.

And then we went back to my apartment to pack up the last little bit of my belongings and hit the road.  It was bittersweet, to say the least.  I left in tears.  We started in that apartment.  We had our first kiss there.  I fell in love with him while I lived in that apartment.  Much of the journey of falling in love with him happened within those walls.  It was our first home, since we did technically live there for a few weeks after the wedding.  There are so many memories....leaving it all behind and knowing that pretty soon there will be strangers living in my apartment is a strange feeling.  It was the end of an era.  I'm going to start crying again..

It was a busy day.  A long day.  A bittersweet day.

DIY Fancy Chalkboard

I worked on this project for what felt like a long time, but I am so pleased with the final outcome!  There are tons of tutorials on the world wide web for painting things with chalkboard paint, so I am aware that this is nothing "new" or "exclusive."  However, I consider my craft to be a FANCY CHALKBOARD and that is a little different from the norm.  :)  This mirror has been around for years.... my parents had it hanging in their living room.  They remodeled their home and this gorgeous mirror got stuck in the garage.  So, when I moved out of their house and into an apartment, the mirror came with me and thus began our travels.  We shared several homes together and it was the focal point of every living room I've ever had.  However, my new husband and I are living in the house I grew up in because my parents have moved into a smaller home.  So...back to square one:  beautiful mirror, but because of the remodeling my parents did several years back, there is nowhere for it to hang.  I decided that if I turned it into a chalk board it would be more versatile and could go pretty much anywhere.  So, that's what I did.

Start out by cleaning your mirror.  

I used Rust-oleum chalk board paint.

Make sure to stir your paint really well!  I forgot to get a paint stick, so I just used a cheap wooden spoon I had around.  :)  I am painting a mirror that has a bordering frame, so I started painting the borders using a small paint brush.  The mirror was attached to the frame and there was no way of separating them.  It got a little messy, so I'd encourage anybody doing a similar project to use something that has a removable frame.

Even though I didn't "stay inside the lines," the finished product looks perfectly imperfect.  It worked out.  :)

After I painted all of the boarders

After you've used a smaller brush to get close to the frame, fill in the rest with chalk board paint by using a much larger brush.  Luckily my husband helped me, because it took forever.  We needed four coats of paint to cover the mirror completely, and I later learned that we should have sanded down the mirror first.

• It takes four days for the paint to dry completely and be used as a chalk board
• The back of the pain can said to drag a piece of chalk across the finished chalkboard before writing it on.  Erase the chalk, and now your chalkboard is ready!

Below is a picture of the FINISHED PRODUCT!  and I even got it done in time to use it at our "Sweetest Day" dinner party!

We had it out on the porch for our guests to see as they arrived and it was such a nice touch!  Everyone was impressed and I think it really dressed up the chalk board!  Now, I have it sitting in the foyer by the front door, as pictured below:

P.S.  God Gave Me You was our wedding song.  I ran out of ideas of stuff to write on the board that day.  But, it is very versatile and I love it!  :)  It makes me smile every time I see it and I hope that if you choose to make a Fancy Chalkboard, you'll enjoy yours as well!