A Story Today and Another One In A Few More Days.

This sciatica has kept me from blogging much lately. I'm on PT three times a week and started going to a chiropractor because the pain is so bad. Hence, not much is happening in my life. I "ice" my hip, left buttock and legs frequently. So see how exciting my life has been for the past 2 months. Wow, can you stand the excitement? Pain pills figure frequently in my life now but I record every single time I take one, even if it's a quarter, half or the full pill. I hate being on them but it is definitely necessary at the moment. The pain from that nerve can be and is debilitating. So here I am tonight thinking of things to blog about. Give me a little sympathy here, please. ;-)

My great granddaughters, featured in some photos below, are pretty funny. I'm relating a few stories today about them.

They love getting mail. We try to mail them something once a week. I'm not doing very well at the once-a-week thing though but they love getting anything in the mail, even a postcard. Sometimes I'll send them Dollar Store items or candy but most times it's a card or note in an envelope.

But the other day I found a doll's comb when cleaning. It looks to be the comb of the character Ariel that she got while she was over here visiting us last Thanksgiving. I put it in an envelope with a note and sent it to her. I had told her mum and her I was sending it so watch for it.

It arrived last Monday with a note from the postman saying that it exceeded its weight so as a courtesy they were leaving it in the mailbox, but they owed the post office a dollar. I was stymied because I have a digital scale for weight and always look up the postage on line even considering if it's thicker than needed, irregular shape, etc. and add additional postage for that. I'm very particular about things like that. But anyway we laughed about it.

But the rest of the story is that Miss C, the oldest to whom I sent it with the note, looked inside, took out the doll comb and hugged the note I sent to her chest. Her mum said she went on and on about her "letter", slept with it, lost it in her bed during the night and her mum had to come in and find it for her! When my granddaughter told me that we laughed ourselves silly. As I said, she loves getting letters, no matter what I say on the card or letter. Sometimes I write, "You [her mum] tell her a story." She doesn't know the difference yet but I'll have to be more careful when she learns to read well. And her father is the best story teller I've ever heard. He keeps ME enthralled with his stories at dinner or evening bedtime stories.

Here's the baby sister, Miss J with the curly dark hair.

She loves being outside and working in the yard.

That antique trunk is one I gave my granddaughter before the girls were born. I'm going to suggest that she paint it white. That will go more with her new decor she's implementing.

In Washington state one day can be like this, dressed in warm clothes...

And the very next day can be warm, dressed in an elegant chapeau. :-)

You can barely see the new chairs and table they have in kitchen nook in their new house. I'm loving that she's decorating similar to mine!!!!

Miss C is either Huck Finn or a bracero with this hat since she's Hispanic. She loves telling people "I'm an Irish Guacamole", since she can't say Guatemalan yet. It's still a tongue twister for her. She's a quick learner though.

This is Miss J with her pony tails. Her hair is so curly it looks short but it's getting long. The white splotches on the wall are different paint colors they're testing. The blue was on the walls of the family room when they moved in but it's gonna go real soon! The whole house will be painted along with all the woodwork trim and cabinets but it'll take them a couple of years I know because of having little munchkins around.

Her favorite color is purple, next is pink.

I saw this colander on the internet, Amazon I think, but I can't justify spending the money just because it's pink. My old one is about 40 years old and still working great.

I love this setting, especially that lovely room divider. The chairs are lovely and the roses just top it off for me.

Isn't this a unique idea for a home outside wall? I like it and think it's adorable. Love the blues also.

Beautiful, but a bit rich looking for me. I am truly a simple girl. Which reminds me of a saying I saw recently and think it is totally accurate:
Be pretty if you can,
Be witty if you must,
But be gracious if it kills you.
I truly try to live by that creed.

I find this kitchen divine. I like how they have an antique rug in the kitchen. I wish more people put rugs in their kitchen. I have rugs over my vinyl to soften my kitchen. It's a small kitchen but adequate for our needs...if we eat out 3 times a week! Notice the doggie bowls are higher than normal so as to help the dog not to have to bend over as much.

I'm going to be looking for something like this that will fit in our small kitchen. Finding the right dimensions at the right price will be my challenge.

This is designer toilet paper! Can you believe that? I'd buy it but I'm sure it costs a lot more than Cottonelle, which I love, and probably not as soft. It is gorgeous and would be fun to have around, but we go through a LOT of toilet paper.

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Linking up with Pink Saturday.  

Reaching My Decision on Dining Chairs

I haven't been blogging as much lately as I'm doing the exercises for sciatica and reading a lot. Today I'm going to go shopping. I need some new tops and hubby complimented me on a new one I bought last week so I'm going to go buy some new ones. At my age I am not a clothes horse anymore. I just wear what covers my body modestly and get on with it. I also bought a new leather chair for our family room as my physical therapist and others say I need a firmer seat than the one I'm in now provides. Okay, buying a new chair isn't a problem for ME! But firmness is essential for back muscles.

I'll try and be more diligent about posting as I love blogging but it isn't my whole life. This is the only thing I could think of to post today and I thought you'd like to see some pretty chairs done up right. :-)
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This was pretty with the large "flowers" tied with a wraparound fabric.

Sweet but not quite what I wanted either.

This was getting more like what I wanted. Remember, I'm a froufrou girl. ;-)

Tying ribbons on for this effect would have taken a lot of ribbon and I was trying for more froufrou than this so it wasn't quite right either.

This is lovely but wouldn't have worked as I wanted to cover most of the chair.

Can't you just see these being stepped on all the time? Of course, I could have made them shorter. Nah, beautiful but not quite right either.

I even considered something like this. This would have been simple and easy to make but I wanted something fancier. This would be great for patio chairs however.

This got me to thinking about 2 separate things for the chair. Something clicked here.

And this also got something clicking.

I used feather boas on some of my lamps and always have a few extra boas around just in case. I'll use a coupon from Joanns to have a small stockpile around. You never know when inspiration will hit and will involve boas and feathers!

This was a real consideration as I like it a lot but I thought on it some more.

This would have been easy also.

This is darling and it would have involved a bit of sewing. Beautiful table and chairs and seat covers. My two new ones are rounded high in the seat like this. But in the end I found some really pretty pink covers at Bed, Bath and Beyond. That involved NO sewing for me and that was a huge plus.

I loved this cover and this chair. The back of my new vintage chairs were not this lovely though. Two of my French chairs have cane on the seat and back, but not the two new craigslist find.

These are gorgeous but I really didn't want to make this many ruffles and sew that much.

So in the end this is what I did to the chairs. You can see the whole blog about redoing the chairs here. A tiny bit of sewing for the tops of the 2 chairs and that was it. Very simple.

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Linking up with Pink Saturday.  

Two French Chairs

I haven't posted for over a week but I've been under the weather. I had been having pain in my left leg and after trying my best to diagnose myself—:-)—I made an appointment with my doctor. She thinks it's sciatica, gave me a prescription for pain killers, muscle relaxants and a prescription for physical therapy. I start Monday. My left leg all the way from the "hip" down to my ankle has hurt so bad I've been on pain killers. I'd cut them into quarters to try and cut the pain. I don't want to become a drug addict!

Now, my husband and I are retired and have scaled down from 5,000 square feet to 1800 square feet. We don't have a formal dining room anymore and that's fine with us. We just have an area off our kitchen to eat. For us a formal dining room would be a wasted space. So I settled on this but knew I'd make it a special place when we bought the house 9 years ago.

I've been looking for a pair of chairs for a long time now. A friend told me she got her gorgeous french dining chairs at Savers, a local thrift store. I perused the place but found nothing, but then she warned me I'd have to be diligent. She painted her chairs white and added a red and white check fabric and they are beautiful. Lusting again. I know, I know.

So finally I found 2 chairs on craigslist that would do. They were sturdy enough, all wood with an open back and a piece of carving down the center of the back, already a bit shabby and cheap at $75 for the two chairs. I couldn't get over to his house fast enough!

I didn't particularly want to paint them or change the seat covers OR make new seat covers, which would have been easy so refer to the first paragraph above as to why. And I recently bought some pink seat covers for all the chairs to have a more cohesive feel to them. Finally, stores are getting more pink in their stock. Even men are wearing more pink lately.

Then I saw this website on etsy for these. SweetDreamTutus and the url is: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SweetDreamsTutus

I have to say this lady was a doll. She answered my questions quickly. I ordered them and she sent them to me in rapid time. I recommend her highly. This photo is on her etsy site; it's not my house. I'm going to order another pair in pink also. I love them!

I have no idea why I'm posting so many photos of these chairs but I wanted you to see how cute they are now after their renovation. So now I have 2 cane back and seat French chairs and 2 of these. I don't have a "before" photo and I'll be darned if I was taking those covers off to show you the before. But they weren't fancy so I made them Fancy.

I've had this fabric for years and was down to my last couple of yards. I absolutely adore this fabric. It's a designer fabric and nice and thick. Absolutely gorgeous in person.

I didn't know how to make them "fit" perfectly and was trying to get every bit of fabric out of the last of the roll I had bought many years ago. So I left them open on the sides and tied them with ribbon. One chair has pink grosgrain and the other one has white satin ribbon. I ran out of the grosgrain and am trying to scale down my craft room—and I'm also lazy—so I used what I had on hand.

I added a boa and a pink paper flower.

Trying to get as many views as I can to show you. You're probably sick of the photos by now, but WAIT! There are even a few more. ;-)

Closeup of the tutu.

The white ribbon ties on the sides come on the tutu.

So you can adjust it to the chair width. Fantastic!

I think this is one of the loveliest lamps ever. A great color, shape and just the right amount of "aging" done to it.

Lovin' this pretty bed and pillows.

Now, this is not my can but I've done this with coffee cans I get from friends since we don't drink coffee. And it is so very easy to make them gorgeous with paint, decals or paper mod-podged on it.

I would absolutely love to find a chair like this. It is gorgeous, but my guess is it isn't comfy to sit in for any length of time.

There are times I'd love to have something like this for my home office and then I think: I have a whole room to myself. Isn't it true that we're sometimes unhappy with the things we have? It takes time to recognize our blessings. While this armoire is gorgeous, I'm blessed to have a whole room for my office. And another room to craft in. I sounded ungrateful but I'm truly not.

Oh my goodness, this is just gorgeous. I'd probably have painted it pink but I do love that color on it. I think it would go well in my living room.  ;-)

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Linking up with Pink Saturday.   

Glasses & Vases Decorated with White Paint and Roses

I pin images on Pinterest a lot, actually every single morning. If you'd like to see more images I post on here and more, then go to my Pinterest and get addicted! There are over 14,000 pins there from all over the internet, only gorgeous images as you'll see. There are well over 25,400 followers so you have to know they are lovely images to view and pin. People have emailed me and said they've gotten so much inspiration from the images there. Just want you to see all the beauty there is in the world instead of all the negativeness being sprouted from the world. I truly mean what my saying is under my logo at the top of the page: My life is to make everything around me beautiful.
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I see a lot of things I'd like to do to our home but I'd truly rather read a book. However, I did finish one thing I've been wanting to do. A vignette of white glassware. I saw it on a blog or pinterest. I just can't remember where now. But I wanted something similar and since I have a plethora of old glasses, vases and such, I decided to finally get with it. I like the way they turned out. I had most of these sitting around the house but had to go to Goodwill and get a few more and it was only $4.25 for the lot. The photos below aren't exceptional but you get the idea. BUT I did you all a favor in that if you click on the photos you'll see an enlarged photo of the same pictures. I don't do this except in rare cases and this is one of them. I love big pictures but the blog isn't conducive to it and it takes a LOT more work to show them bigger. So enjoy looking at them. Just click and they'll be 1000 pixels wide instead of my usual 700 for the personal photos I display on here.

I painted them white 3 or 4 times depending on the item. I then scruffed them up a bit with sandpaper to give them an old look. The large vase in the back center is plastic and it was the easiest one to accept the paint. All others are glass.

A wider look at the room actually.

I found pink ribbons, drop cloth, laces, netting and different kinds of small roses to add to each one.  These might change a tiny bit. I thought I had some raffia but I can't find it and I really wanted some on these.

I'm a devotee of putting things under living room tables, always have and don't see that changing any time in the future. Here I just took the vintage drawer filled with gorgeous faux peonies from the top to just under the bottom of the table. There are also boxes under there with things I might need in a hurry. That rose covered box on the right contains my Dyno label maker. Don't have to sift through cabinets trying to find it when I want to label something.

As always, this north facing house has terrible lighting so this is as good as I can get it unless the sun is straight up and the solar tubes catch it.

Just another view of the living room with light and shadows playing across the room from the solar tubes.

I think this is cute for a French-style decor.

This is very similar to my bed cover. I love white and always will. I'm thinking of a long white pillow across the bottom. I'd make it, of course. I have so many pillows in my craft room I'll never have to buy any more. Some I made, some were given to me and some I bought. All kinds, even down pillows.

A cute red and white dining room and kitchen.

A cute setting for a table. I always look around for things I already have and decorate them differently for the different times of my life. Sometimes I want simply and sometimes, I want flashy and bling. Just never know.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have an entrance like this one? I think it's gorgeous.

This looks like it could be a craft room and a potting area also. Lucky is the woman who has this home though.

How nice to have this sewing and craft area kind of sectioned off from the rest of the home with that little porch railing. Looks antique also.

I like that sofa and that table. The aqua of the wall is gorgeous also.

There are some things that make me smile and giggle. This is one of those things. Pink in the garden!

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Linking up with Pink Saturday.