Fresh Green Apple Wreath

Thank you all so much for your prayers! Our Uncle Bob, was able to return home from the hospital today after getting a pacemaker put in yesterday, and I got the okay to be up and about again - yay! Thank you all for your sweet notes of encouragement. I am going to be extra careful from here on out and have to cut back on some things (mainly we won't be offering as many new items in our Etsy shop as I had planned on this spring, but hopefully will be able to by this fall!) I need to keep my little munchkin cooking for as long as possible and don't need any more scares like these past two weeks! We will be reopening our shop on Friday with all of our current items and hopefully will be slowly offering a few more new things over the next few weeks but definitely not as many as originally planned.

Also, I wanted to say thank you to René over at Cottage and Vine for featuring Dana's apartment that we did a post on back in August. You should check out her fabulous blog that is full of decorating ideas on a budget! I especially have enjoyed her recent drop-cloth posts. There are a few ideas I really want to try!

We finally got all of our Christmas decorations down and everything put away. I always have such mixed feelings when we take down all of the Christmas stuff. At first is seems so depressing and our house starts to look so barren and cold. Then once everything is put away I always get a huge urge to clean (and it was even worse this year thanks to my already being in major nesting mode - haha). Because I am not supposed to be doing a whole lot still, Jon did most of the scrubbing and heavy-duty cleaning and I got to work on cleaning out drawers and organizing. Once the cleaning is done I always get excited again and don't miss the Christmas decorations at all. It feel so good to have everything organized and have a fresh clean slate to start playing around with. I always struggle the most with decorating this time of year, though, because by January I am starting to get sick of the darker, warmer colors that I start using in September, but it is too early to do anything too spring-like. I generally end up sticking with the same green and white palette I use for Christmas but try to lighten and brighten it up a bit more.

Today I worked on a few projects. First Lillie and I added some fresh green apples to a wreath. She thought poking holes in the apples was great fun! Several years ago I covered a grapevine wreath left over from our wedding with a mix of greenery from Hobby Lobby and every year after Christmas I pull it out and add either fresh granny smith apples or pears to it. I think it looks better when I do a full circle of apples (filling in the gaps between the apples with more apples) but that makes the wreath sooooo heavy. When I use it for our front door I do that because I think it looks prettier and our wreath hanger can handle the weight, but indoors on this mirror I was afraid it would be too heavy.

The apples generally last around 2 to 3 weeks depending on the weather and then I normally replace them once or twice and then after that it is on to a new project and I put this away or use it somewhere else until the following January. Obviously I could use faux apples and glue them on the wreath but I like using fresh, natural items as much as possible!

We removed the Silent Night and The First Noel prints from the frames and put back in photos of Miss Lillabel. I kept the burlap pillows and stack of books with the boxwood as is for now because they still work with the green of the wreath. Then I switched out the little rosemary tree (which had died while we were away) for some oversized twine balls.

I took down all of the greenery, lights and stockings from the mantel but left the paperwhites. I have a few projects planned for sprucing the mantel back up - it looks so bare and boring now!

I also have some projects planned for this little corner of the living room too that I hope to get to in the next week or so.

Although I have always enjoyed making cards and candy and little things like that I have never done any decorating for Valentine's Day before. This year though I have a few projects I am planning on doing starting with a few pillows. I have four that I am working on. I got two of them finished today and they are sitting on our sofa. The other two I am still working on. Here is the script from one of the finished ones. Hopefully I will have time to photograph them tomorrow in natural light. I didn't finish them until tonight so there wasn't any point in trying to take any photos.