Winter Wreath with Rosettes

I have had some DIY projects on my To Do List the past few days to keep us occupied during the last few days of our holiday break! One of those projects was a winter wreath to replace the christmas swag I had on my front doors- I did not want to go long without something up because we have glass front doors- and I felt it was too early for Valentine's day wreaths- although had I found 2 red berry wreaths on clearance I may have scratched this project altogether!

I had some old grapevine wreaths left over from my nest photography prop (so excuse their mishapen circle shape!!!) You can find these new at Michael's for around $5-$10 depending on size. I believe these were the 18" size which is $5. I knew I wanted to use those and some funky blue coloring for a winter wreath. I had actually purchased this blue spray paint for a project I thought I would use in my new office but never got around to it!! We have been so blessed to have very mild weather this past week- like in the 50's and 60's to complete this project!


First we spray painted it blue. I used Valspar Mediterranean gloss spray paint.

Then once it was dry- about 24 hours because we painted both sides and I did not want to take a chance that this might rub off on my front doors!! We started on the flower rosettes. I did take photos of making the rosette but I never realized how bad my hands looked close up- definitely not a hand model over here- so I will just link you to the tutorial I found on them at the end. Trust me it's in your best interest!!

The only thing I did different was at the end before I glued by final piece to the back I added a piece of fabric covered flower wire so I could twist them on the wreath - You could have hot glued them to the wreath but this sounded easier to me.

My original goal was to make 5 on each wreath but as you can see the first ones turned out a bit smaller then I had hoped so I had to add a 2nd layer to each one to make them fat enough for my wreath!! Now I will say making the rosettes was not as hard as I thought it was going to be- but it was very time consuming and tedious. I don't see many of these on my projects in the future!!!

Finally 6 rosettes and 3 days later the wreaths were done!! If I have time I may go back and make a few more for each one but probably not!! LOL

I am glad I made them- I love the grapevine wreath color but I may do something else to them besides the rosettes- thankfully since they are just attached with the floral wire I can remove them easily if I want to change things up a bit.

Sorry about the white coloring- I know it's had to see the detail on these from afar.

Here is the link for the Rosette Tutorial

Happy New Year!
~ Elizabeth

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Mailbox Mohawk

This morning I took our christmas cards out to the mailbox and I realized our mailbox had a frosty mohawk so I quickly ran back inside to get my camera and grab some images. It's times like this that I wish I had a macro lens- but I make do with the ones I do have!!

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Frosty Friday

I am so excited to photograph our house this winter- we actually have plants and trees and interesting things that will gather frost, snow and ice on them!! Here are a few from this past week with the frost and leftover snow on them. All of these were taken with my Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 lens.

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Homemade Cheesy Potato Soup

This soup is absolutely delicious and perfect for the winter weather coming up. After making it the first time to try it out, I quickly made 2 more batches to freeze. That was only a couple of weekends ago and we are down to just 2 more servings frozen! My son loves to have this as an afterschool snack!
You can top it with bacon and green onions or just cheddar!

Original Recipe:

2 tbsp. butter

1/4 of a large onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

4 baking potatoes

1/3 cup flour

4 1/2 cups milk

1 1/4 cups shredded extra sharp cheddar cheese

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1/2 cup reduced fat sour cream

1/4 cup chopped green onions

1/2 cup bacon bits

I modified our recipe at bit to meet our families tastes so we used 1/8 of an onion, 1% milk, and since I did not have a real clove of garlic I used some garlic powder! Oh and no chopped green onions at the end either!!

* Bake your potatoes by piercing with a fork, wrapping in paper towels and cooking in microwave for 6-9 minutes, depending on size. After the potatoes came out I peeled most of the skin off but you could keep it if you like.

* Remove potatoes and coarsely mash, set aside.

* In a large pot melt the butter over medium/low heat. Add the onions and garlic and saute until soft, 5-8 minutes

* Add flour and mix and stir, then add milk stirring with a wisk until blended. Cook over medium heat until thick and bubbly, about 10 minutes.

* Add mashed potatoes, 1 cup cheese, salt & pepper stirring until cheese melts. Remove from heat.

* Stir in sour cream and 1/2 cup onions(if like). Cook over low heat 10 minutes or until heated.

*Pour soup in bowls and add toppings as preferred.

If freezing pour soup into 4 medium size tupperware containers, label tops with date and soup. Set out on counter @ 30 minutes or until room temperature, then freeze.

Serves 8

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Winter/Holiday Centerpiece

I know this it's not even Thanksgiving yet but I wanted to share with you the Winter Wonderland centerpiece I made for my Shutterfly Scrapbook party I shared with you yesterday.

This would make for a perfect transition centerpiece after the holidays for winter and was super easy to create- however I would suggest buying the products for it now as I am not sure how easy they will be to find on clearance after the holidays. I bought everything this year so I will share with you at the end where I found them! Can you guess what the hardest thing was to find?

Not the christmas tree candles- but the plain white candles!! I thought this was going to be so easy to find. But I wanted good ol' fashioned wick candles and apparently the trend now is the flameless candles or ones that were scented. Since I plan to use these candles for many different centerpieces I wanted them to be unscented and white!

Here is my entry way table decorated for my winter wonderland party. I have been wanting some of those glass vases for a while now but Michael's never had them on sale- lucky me in my search for white candles I ended up at GardenRidge and they had these awesome vases in all kinds of sizes for $3-$8 which was way less then M's was charging even at half price! The white candles are sitting in kosher salt - something I already had on hand in my pantry!

Now where to find everything:
Christmas Tree tea light holder: Michael's $15 reg price
White Candles: Garden Ridge (set of 3 $8-10)
Candle Trees: Garden Ridge $8 each
Snow: Michael's @ $4
Glass vases: GardenRidge price varies on size & shape
Blue Ornaments: I had these left over from last year. I used both mini and full size ones.
Kosher Salt for bottom of vases: grocery store

Next week I will show you how I turned my entry way table back into a fall display by using popcorn kernals!

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Digital Scrapbook Party

I thought I would change things up a bit today and share with you some photos from my Winter Wonderland Digital Scrapbook Party from Shutterfly. A couple months ago I received an email from Shutterfly- whom I love dearly- and it talked about a chance to win a FREE scrapbook party for myself and 14 guests! I took a pretty long break from digital scrapbooking and now have the time to get back into it so I thought this was the perfect opportunity for me to jump in and share it with my friends!

The party was hosted by Shutterfly and House Party. I logged onto the House Party site and applied to be a host- thinking there was not much chance I would be suggested. But to my delight I was!! Wohoo!! My package would be arriving in just a few weeks!! Wohoo!!

Shutterfly provided each of my guests a free 8X8 photo book + 10 free holiday cards! How awesome was that. Inside my box were also sample cards, a $10 credit to sugarplum, an easel to display my favorite scrapbook, balloons, and a CD with feedback from others who had created a photo book thru shutterfly. Here is a photo of everything I had for my guests (the photobooks are mine- everything else is from shutterfly) I decided to go with a Winter Wonderland theme and immediately started searching pinterest for ideas on winter decorating. Here is a variation of what I came up with- I will be detailing the centerpiece and entry table decor in the next post.

If you have kids who love to play the most recent game out on the Xbox360, you love to cook, or do crafts you need to check out HouseParty.com. Once you set up an account you can apply to host as many parties as you like. They provide you with the goodies- you provide the friends and food and tada you have a party! No strings attached!! This would be perfect for girls night outs and get togethers. Parties are typically planned for a couple months in advance and new ones are always being added.

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