A Few Fall Favorites!

A few posts back, I showed you my outdoor fall decorating so by now you know how much I love this time of year. It's a time for change, but it's a welcome change, and I embrace it whole heartedly. I think that as women, most of us seem to want to "nest" and cozy up our homes for the long cold months ahead and the cooler days seem to put us in that mind set. Here are a few random shots that I saw on Flickr that I wanted to share with you. I hope you are all having a very inspiring, beautiful fall day! ~Stacy~

My Fabulous New Find!

One day not too long ago I received a phone call from a friend of mine who has a booth in an antique mall. She went on to describe to me a floor lamp that she had acquired recently and she wanted to know if I wanted "first crack" at it before she put it in her booth for sale. Not expecting it to be as pretty as she described, I decided to go down to the mall and check it out.

What I saw was this gorgeous lamp and one that I certainly didn't expect to find in this area of the country. This is a "California" lamp as I call it. You know...the kind you only find at the Rose Bowl Flea Market or some intriguing place like that! The lamp has six long taper candle stye lights. The candles are actually made out of hard wood with little silicone bulbs on the ends. The lamp has amazing porcelain roses on the column, around each candle cup and on the base. Well, as you can tell, the lamp is now sitting in our home and I'm so delighted that I decided to come home with it. Something like this is very hard to find in the area that I live and it's a treasure that I won't part with any time soon! ~Stacy~

Medallion Madness!

A friend of mine is simply mad over ceiling medallions! She has them everywhere in her home and she recently inspired me to finish one of my own for over our dining room chandelier. This medallion actually came from her...a leftover one that she purchased from Lowe's a few years back.

This medallion is stunning and I just love the details on it. It is made out of lightweight composite and comes in a prefinished white. I opted to embellish it with paint so I painted the background a creamy ivory and then hand painted the parts of it that I wanted to stand out. I painted the border pink as well as the flowers and outlined the large shells on each corner in pink. I also lightly highlighted the ridges on the shells to make them appear a little more three dimensional. The leaves were painted light green and the scrollwork was painted a very pale shade of yellow. There is also a small amount of light brown near the center to give it a slight contrast just so everything doesn't look so pale.

You can pick up ceiling medallions in various sizes at Lowe's or Home Depot in the lighting section. They usually range from $20 - $60 depending on the size and how ornate it is. If you want to go all out, you can also order original plaster medallions from several reputable companies that make those beautiful furniture appliques and the like. I can't think of a better way to highlight your chandelier than to add a ceiling medallion to your decor and they look especially stunning if you have high or vaulted ceilings. If you're looking for a quick, fun project for fall, this is it! Get inspired and have fun ~Stacy~

I Love Fall!

Like many of you, fall really is my favorite time of the year. I absolutely love fall decor, pumpkins, candles that smell of intriguing spices, the cooler weather...it's definitely the season for me! I just finished decorating my front porch yesterday and I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. I need darker chairs!, but these ones will have to do. My decorating tends to be abit on the whimsical side...notice the sunglasses on my concrete dog and the fairies and gnomes hanging from my tulle and grapevines on the front window.

The best thing about my fall decor is that almost everything has been collected over time from my favorite thrift stores. It's amazing what people get rid of in the off season and that is the best time to collect it. I sometimes get strange looks when I am buying pumpkins in April, but hey...a girl has got to do what a girl has got to do! When it gets closer to Halloween, I will incorporate more Halloween decor and when my pumpkins in the garden are ready (and there are tons of them this year!) they will all go on the porch with straw bales taking the place of the wicker rocking chairs. Enjoy the photos and have a happy fall! ~Stacy~

Reading, Relaxing and Still Vacationing...

How can it be September already? For some of you, September probably didn't come soon enough! Now it's back to regular routines with the kids back in school and the expressions of "I'm bored" and "there's nothing to do" no longer echo throughout the house. My summer has stretched on for awhile longer. I don't have kids so I am able to make the lovely warm days of summer last without having too strict of a routine. Okay, I'll be honest, I have NO routine! (*_*) All I know is that blogging has definitely taken a back seat this summer...as many of you have probably noticed!

When I first set out to blog, I had my mind made up that I wasn't going to be pressured to blog just for the sake of blogging!, and that's obviously what has happened this summer. My Mom was here for six weeks, we went on a few camping trips and now we have a three week reprive before we go on a two week camping trip to Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon. I'm looking so forward to it because my brother and his family and perhaps my Mom as well are all coming along and we haven't been on a family holiday together since we were teenagers. Should be a riot! I've never been to the Grand Canyon and neither has my family, except for my husband, so this will be a first for all of us. Plus, Lake Powell is an amazing place! For those of you who are not familiar with it, do you remember the first Planet of the Apes movie where the spaceship with Charleton Heston lands in the water in this strange looking moonscape of a landscape? Well, that was filmed at Lake Powell. It's a beautiful place that borders on Southern Utah and Arizona. See how gorgeous it is!...the last picture is of Bryce Canyon, another breathtaking place in Utah!

During the summer I have had a chance to do abit of reading as well, something that I dearly love to do, but never seem to make time for. I read three books in a row and enjoyed them all...

These three books were all really enjoyable especially the last one...quite hilarious! The Shack is quite a controversial book in some circles and while I enjoyed reading it, the jury is still out on that one. I haven't really made up my mind about it yet! The Birth of Venus was an excellent read and the last one by Fannie Flagg was my favorite! There are more books by this author with the same characters in them so I think I'll have to seek them out. The best thing about these books is that all paperbacks in my favorite thrift store are $1 and hard covers are $2 so reading all three of these only set me back $3. I can live with that!

Now I have three weeks to catch up on web site work until I go galavanting off again! I hope you all had a fantastic summer and that you are able to stretch things out abit the way I am. Autumn is by far my favorite season of the year though so I'm looking forward to fall decorating and entertaining! It's almost time to cozy up our homes! What fun! Until next time, ~Stacy~ xo