Category Archives: Autumn

Springtime in December

We woke to another dreary day with the rain slowly coming down, but the temperature, oh the temperature, it’s near 60ºF or 16ºC. Unbelievable! and Wonderful! Who cares if it’s raining!

Gray skies!

Raindrops on the window.

Red crabapple berries are so colorful on the trees against the gray skies. What a wonderful spring, (I mean late fall) day!

The feeder isn’t too busy this morning: sparrows,…

… a chickadee,… and a house wren.

My husband started setting up our Snow Village houses yesterday. I don’t have many, but just enough. Part of my collection is my grandma’s church and house which are very special to me.

We don’t put them out every year and we don’t have a set place for them. One year they were in the bay window and other years they’ve been on the buffet in the dining room, other years we will put a house here and there. This year my husband put an old bi-fold closet door on the desk in the family room. It seems to be the perfect size. Here’s a sneak peak at our little village.

I’ve been collecting these houses since the late 1980s. They used to be really really popular, but you don’t see them for sale too much anymore. I remember that it seemed like every Hallmark store or gift shop carried these houses and had massive displays of them.

Here’s a photo of a little tray of Santas that I have on the table in the foyer.

And last, but not least, here are Gina and Lucy sharing their special things as sisters so lovingly do. Gina is letting Lucy hold her Rudolph toy and Lucy is giving Gina her silver ball ornament to hang on the Christmas tree. ❤

Hope you all are having a sweet and peaceful weekend.

A Beautiful Beginning and a Beautiful Ending

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When the day starts and ends as beautifully as today did, what happened, or did not happen, in the middle doesn’t seem to matter so much. As you can see, the day started out with a beautiful sunrise, which I was up quite early to see.

I was in the car for about an hour and a half bringing my daughter to school and then making the trip back home. When I got home I discovered the power was out (it never is), so the garage door wouldn’t open and, here’s the really unfortunate part, I had locked all the storm doors (nope, no keys for those), so had no way to get in the house. I’ll leave out the parts about what came out of my mouth and the kicking of the storm door (to see if it would have pity on me and unlock itself), not a pretty site.

I didn’t get back inside the house until 12:30 in the afternoon (enough time to eat breakfast (or lunch), shower, and get back in the car for pick up! Knitting, sewing, embroidering, crocheting? … no, not today, I’m afraid.

And, now here’s how the day ended. It took my breath away, and made all the craziness of the day disappear.

The sunset is reflected in the windows; can you see it?

We have these cute paper houses in our bay window. You can see the roof tops of some of them in the photo above. They are super easy to put together and last from year to year. They are pinned on my “Paper Crafts” board here. Or, you can go directly to the websites where these came from: Dover Publications and welovetoillustrate.blogspot.com to print them out for yourself. Each house prints on a basic sized sheet of paper.

While writing this post, I am sitting in front of the cozy, warm fire and enjoying the Christmas tree, so the ending on this crazy day is perfect.

Hope you had a much smoother day than I did, and I hope your beginning and ending was as beautiful as mine was.

Waking Up to a Winter Wonderland

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We’ve had lots of moisture since Thanksgiving, but since it’s been above freezing it has been rain. Last night it fell below freezing, so we are waking up to a winter wonderland. It is truly beautiful, and… my favorite kind of snow, melting.

It’s very cozy and warm inside. Our large Christmas tree is to the left of this photo. This little tree is my “sweets” tree where I hang vintage cookie cutters and yummy looking ornaments.

It’s very timely that I just finished this winter set for my Kaye Wiggs Millie. This set was fun to make, love this color so much, a heathered sky blue. Millie is hanging on tight to her stuffed snowman that I made her. I think she’s afraid she may have to give it up and share with it another little girl.

We often say in Chicago that if you don’t like the current weather, wait 5 minutes and it will change. While this change didn’t happen in 5 minutes, this was yesterday morning.