Thursday, December 25, 2014

Tuesday, December 23, 2014



Gift to myself this year, a necklace and bracelet set that I made myself! These are made of gorgeous turquoise colored glass beads, silver tone charms and black crystal beads and closed with a sterling silver heart shaped clasp! The bracelet was made from left over material, so now I have a set! It's so nice to make your own jewelry sometimes because you can make them exactly how you want!





I absolutely love wearing scarves in cooler weather, even here in Southern California, scarves can be such a practical and beautiful accessory to a girl's outfit!  

Sunday, December 14, 2014



Last night I had the first fire in the living room. It's quite cozy to listen to the fire crackling, sipping hot chocolate while my puppies lying on my legs like little fury chubby lumps.  

Wednesday, December 10, 2014


Some more decorating pictures from rest of the house other than my living room!  For the dining room this year I bought this gorgeous silk flower arrangement from Michaels. This came from pre Black Friday sale with 75% discount, since their sale was so good this year, the location I go to has pretty much been emptied out the week after Thanks Giving.


It's just a all around gorgeous flower arrangement! I will be displaying it around Christmas for many years to come! The tall candle holder was a wedding gift from Pottery Barn from three years ago, I added in two candle tea lights with a Christmas theme.


I know I've posted this wreath before but here's another look of the wreath I made myself!


For the bedroom this year I put out these red ornament cones on top of the dresser, I bought several of them in different color this year because I absolutely love them!


I also have matching red ornament wreath to go with my cones! These gorgeous decorations are from Target and I think Fie Fie approves!


For the tv room I have a white Christmas tree and I changed out my regular pillows with red and white snow flake pillows. I hope to find maybe one or two nice pillows that would match these ones next year. The white Christmas tree came from Walmart, they had quite a selection of nice and cheap Christmas trees this year, I absolutely love this one! I'm hoping to find a pink tinsel tree next year if I'm lucky, but this year I didn't see any at the store:(


I love this tree topper from Target, it matches the polka dot ribbon and the colors of my ornaments, and it is glittery!


For my book shelf I changed out my usual display and decorated with vintage deer and ornaments. I like to put colorful Christmas tree ornaments in jars as a simple display. The pink glass jewelry box holds most of my bakelite jewelry collection!


I took this picture of my Christmas tree several years ago and now it's the perfect time to display it!


How about a USB charged Christmas tree?  The paw print in the picture frame belong to Bobby, that's the one item I will be saving if my house was catching on fire. again. 


Some more of the Christmas ornament wreath and cone!


Finally, my doggies make my house officially a happy place to be:)

Sunday, December 7, 2014


I absolutely love this room in the house now after the Christmas tree and ornaments are up! I'm all finished with the decorations, the only thing left to do is to make a fire one of these days... in the fireplace of course!



When the weather gets a bit colder I like to make warm comfy food like a soup or stew. Tonight I threw together a lot of vegetable and mushroom in the crockpot to make a beef stew. Tomorrow when I come home this will be ready for dinner! There's enough left over meat which I stored in a separate bag in the fridge, maybe tomorrow my doggies will get some beef dinner too!

Friday, December 5, 2014




It's winter time and I've been craving some winter flavored candles.


I bought two tea candle holders that have a snowflake design, the two pumpkin pecan waffles candles smell amazing.


I had a similar snowman candle when I was a kid, it was one of my favorite item displayed on the shelf, so I took this little guy home!


Slightly sweet marshmallow scent and fresh balsam, which kind of smell like fresh Christmas tree.


Butterscotch toffee and warm caramel cider smell so delicious, they are almost good enough to eat!


Ok start with the Fresh Balsam in a pretty silver candle holder while I decorate my Christmas tree no. 4!

These are some of my favorite ornaments this year.  It's always a nice surprise when I dig my ornament boxes out of the storage around this time of the year to find beautiful ornaments that I had already forgotten about.  I found this cupcake in a cake stand ornament years ago and it's truly one of my favorite.  With each year passing I simply love it more!


This beautiful Santa Clause ornament is a new one I acquired this year.  It was a deeply discounted but high quality ornament that you would never find in the big box stores. The ornament came in careful packaging in a heavy box, it's glass made in Poland and I'm impressed with its color, quality and detail every time I see it!


This one cracks me up, I have a knitting basket just like this one, so how could I not own a knitting basket ornament?



Also, I love snowman ornaments of all sorts. The soft and big snowman was spotted by Fie Fie when I first took it out of the bag, he had already sifted through my ornaments this year and stole several soft fluffy teddy bear or snowman ornaments, however he was particularly fixated on THIS snowman and cried non stop whenever he got near the tree. Finally when my big fluffy teddy bear wants a small soft snowman I just had to give in, the snowman was sadly murdered within an hour.  Luckily I found a backup at Michaels, thank goodness for Black Friday discounts!






Thursday, December 4, 2014



One more wreath that I made myself, these are so simple to make and the outcome is always very pretty!

Monday, December 1, 2014





I ran a marathon of Christmas decoration this weekend. The weather was cloudy and rainy, perfect day to drink coffee and work on Christmas projects! I made two sets of wreath and garlands from scratch, decorated three trees and touched up various small projects around the house!



 The wreath and garland lights up! Overall I'm quite proud of myself for pulling this stuff together!


Here's a recap of the first tree I decorated this year! A small two ft white Christmas tree with lights.


Last night I went out and picked out a tree, I was set on getting a real tree because they smell so nice! I don't drag a big tree home by myself anymore, instead I pay 20 bucks to have it delivered. This morning the tree showed up around 10:30 and right away I got my hands on decorating it!


Finally, who's glittering next to Peter Rabbit and his mom?


Mr. Christmas tree no. 3 of course!

Saturday, November 29, 2014


I only had one tabletop Christmas tree before, and here's one of the pictures that I found...


I got it from Cost Plus years and years ago. It was an early evening and I wandered into the store to look at all the excitement being offered out there in the world. I remember walking around and thinking what a huge production it would be to actually buy a huge christmas tree and all that ornaments, but how much fun would that be?  When I saw the little miniature tree my heart jumped, it was so expensive back in the day that even now I still remember it, $48!! Before tax!! That was a lot of food and gas money for a college student like me. Gas was $20 for a tank, and 5 bucks bought me lunch... my head quickly raced for the numbers. But, I was working, and I justified the cost with two hours of teaching piano lessons.  So with my heart pumping I took the little tree home, out of my ugly and bare home where I did not have a single piece of furniture called my own except a table lamp, I proudly placed this little tree on my desk.  

I know I shouldn't be so materialist about things but it was a piece of festivity that had something to do with me.  The little tree with the tiny lights accompanied me through many nights of toiling through homework assignments, many hours of teaching, and on particular cold and exhausting nights through practicing to prepare for lessons and recitals.  It also was there when I enjoyed a warm cup of tea with some cookies and a good movie, it just plain made me happy. 

Since I didn't see any reason why my pretty tree had to be taken out of sight when Christmas was over, I kept it lit until well after the holiday. In fact, it was on all year round and I did not think anything of it. Once in a while I would hear comments from parents like, "I had a grandma that used to keep her Christmas tree out all year long," and I didn't think much of that either. Finally the tree light gave out and the tree got tucked into a corner of the room collecting dust.  Somehow, without the lights, the tree just lost all it's magic power.  Eventually my tree got placed on the curb and got picked up by somebody else.  

For the last couple of night, maybe all this holiday decorating has brought back memories, I kept thinking about my tree and wishing that I could have it back.  It would be so neat to have a miniature tree twinkling with lights sitting on my desk again!

Today just so happened that I was in Michael's to shop for ornaments for my wreath and garlands.  I had decided to buy a real Christmas tree this year, but I still walked through the Christmas tree section. There were many carefully packaged 4-6 feet tall trees neatly stacked on the shelves, and after circling the aisle a couple of times, I noticed a few dozen 2 ft tall white fuzzy sticks, very unceremoniously thrown on one section on the floor without any package.  I pulled one out to see what they were, turned out, these were white miniature Christmas trees, WITH LIGHTS!!!  This was a plain tree that needed to be fluffed out and decorated, which was just perfect for me.  Now you have to give credit to where credit is due, Michael's had a section of miniature Christmas tree decorations, complete with miniature tree top, ornaments, tree skirt, etc., etc.  


I picked out a snowman tree skirt, some vintage looking glass ornament sets and a silver colored star miniature tree topper! I felt like a little kid in a candy store, and I had a blast decorating it as soon as I got home.  I think my new tree has all the wonderful holiday cheer as the one I remembered and then some!  Hopefully the lights on this one will hold up for me to enjoy it for years to come! 

Friday, November 28, 2014



I couldn't wait one more day to get the fall decorations out. Last night I took down all the fall decor around the house and put up some garland on top of the fireplace, unfortunately it looked too flat and didn't fill up that empty wall space.  I thought putting a wreath would make it look better, but I had to make one myself in order for everything to match!


This was my first handmade Christmas wreath, I was able to find a blank one at Michael's for a good size with lights already wired in. I've no clue what's the right way to secure the ornaments, but these seem to do alright for now!


Ta-da! What do you think? Next step will be the tree!

New Year Preparation

I always like to do a bit of preparation at the end of each year to welcome the new year, although this year things were very challenging, I...