the one with… christmas eve

Welcome 2014!

It's my first week back at work after 2 weeks holiday.  I had a lovely holiday spending time at home, hanging with family, friends and little Charlie - I think he loved having me around so much xo

I love hosting Christmas Eve at my place, particularly now with the veranda.  There is plenty of room for everyone.

The evening is a shared hosting job with my niece, something I look forward to each year.

This year we went with a purple, silver and white theme for the table that we carried across to the ice cream dessert bar.  I picked up the purple dessert cups from Big W who had them for $2 each.

We like to keep the table clear to allow lots of space for all of the yummy seafood so my niece hung decorations over the table.

The trees and stars were actually red and white stripe but after some silver spray paint and some purple glitter we had sparkles.

I made the tissue paper garland a couple of nights before Christmas Eve for the dessert bar.  They did take a few hours to make but once you've made a couple, you get the hang of it and it becomes so much easier.  I chose 2 different shades of purple and silver.

My niece even made the vanilla bean ice cream from scratch and we had lots of topping options like crushed nuts, sprinkles, chocolate sauce, wafers, strawberries, crushed chocolate, crushed picnic, crushed crunchy and I'm sure there was a couple more.

The next day I packed up all the presents under the tree and headed over to my parents (4 mins away) to spend the day with family and enjoy mums baked dinner - in air conditioning, of course!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and wish you all the best for 2014.

I have a feeling it's going to be a fabulous year!

Lisa xo

the one... with what I got

February Challenge: $0 Spend

Look what my gorgeous sister gave me for Christmas.  She was on fire with the selecion of gifts!

I actually squealed when I unwrapped it!

I've flipped through it a few times trying to decide which project I will tackle first.  There are just so many choices.

A  couple of projects I'm keen to do are the:

• Faux Wallpaper on page 24.
• Painted Doormat on page 311. Love this one.
• Sketch Pillow on page 252.
• Paint Lamp Base on page 248.

And that's just to start.

What are your thoughts on the book?  Have you tackled a project yet?

Lisa xo

the one... with christmas celebrations

I realise we are heading towards the end of the January but I wanted to share with you a few photos from Christmas.

Christmas Eve has been at my place for the last couple of years and this year it was on the new veranda.

I co-host the evening with my beautiful niece and this year we wanted a centre piece that was off the table to allow more space for the seafood.

This is what we did.

We found a stick in her yard and spray painted it silver.  After it dried we hung it from the veranda rafters - I really wanted to use fishing wire but I didn't have any on hand so we went with string.

After we hung the branch up, my niece got to work on hanging the purple and silver baubles and I think she did a stunning job.

We also sticky taped butchers paper to the table and had crayons for everyone to draw all over it.  There was some interesting pictures by the end of the night.

Christmas morning was just Charlie and myself, before we head over to my parents place, and this was Charlie's stash.

I think Santa was very good to him this year - he must have been a very good puppy!

Lisa xo