Life Right Now

Let me introduce Ruggles. She's our new little dog that we have had now for two days. We are only beginning to get to know each other and figure out each other's language.  Ruggles is a Yorkie mix although I do find she looks a lot like Juno so the Yorkie part must be pretty strong.  She ... and by 'she' I mean 'he' because Ruggles is a male and having only had a female dog I'm finding I have huge pronoun problems .. he is smaller than Juno and is underweight so we are doing our best to feed her and love her up.

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Today we went on a winter cookout to a nearby conservation area. We were looking for a good way to remember my father as this is the one-year anniversary of his death and a winter cookout seemed just right. My dad loved the outdoors and we often went on hikes and cookouts all year round when I was growing up.  

We went to a place called Rattlesnake Point which is much prettier than the name might suggest. It is on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment with huge limestone cliffs and a forest along the top that we hiked through. There was a dusting of snow which is more than we have at home now since it melted last week.

  

We had a bit of a time lighting the fire and almost went through the entire Sunday New York Times newspaper trying to get it lit. Thankfully it finally caught and we were able to cook our hotdogs. It was nice to sit around the fire getting warm and drinking hot chocolate.

 

 

 
Ruggles did very well walking through the woods and then while we had the campfire, I carried her in my jacket so she didn't get cold (or into trouble). It was quite an outing for her second day with us.

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And in other news we finally have our Christmas tree decorated which I will show you pictures of very soon.  We made some owls to go on it as we wanted a Scandinavian woodland type of tree this year and they worked out really well.  All those toilet paper rolls finally came in handy!

11 Elements of Scandinavian Christmas Style

I love Scandinavian style and especially at Christmastime. In terms of climate and landscape, Scandinavia is very similar to Canada so their style is well suited to the dark, cold, and dreary days of winter that we experience too. 

I've been pouring over lots and lots of photos to get some ideas on how the Scandinavians decorate for Christmas.  Do you want to know how to get some of that Scandi-chic Christmas style for yourself? I've come up with 11 tips to help you along:

1. Embrace white. And use it liberally! There you have the first and most important rule of Scandi decorating. If someone asks you what colour you want an item in, always say white. There is something to be said for all the white. It is simple, it looks clean, and it looks bright. So Step #1 - find all the white ornaments/bowls/jugs you have around the house and put them out for Christmas.

My Scandinavian Home

2. Add tiny bits of colour. Once you have your foundation of white you can add in a little colour. Don't go crazy though - dial it back, restrain yourself. I have the hardest time with this. I figure a white canvas is a perfect backdrop for turquoise or hits of bright green, but not in Scandinavian decorating. In Scandi style, colour means neutrals, like gray, black and beige, possibly light blue or green, and, especially at Christmas, tiny amounts of red. Just a little though or you won't have Scandinavian decorating, you will have Santa's workshop.

Digsdigs

Style at Home

3. Lots of wood. Wood is important, very important. It is best if you have wood floors (light-coloured or painted wood) and wood furniture (natural or painted), but if you lack those don't despair. You can still add in wooden bowls, cutting boards, candlesticks, or logs by the fireplace. If you have a choice, go with light-coloured wood, but dark wood is better than no wood because wood is very important. My theory is that living in a forested country brings out your inner lumberjack and you want lots and lots of wood around your home.

Style at Home

My Scandinavian Home

4. Candles, twinkle lights, and lanterns. Northern countries like those in Scandinavia and Canada get short-changed when it comes to daylight at this time of year and it gets dark very early. The best way to deal with this is to embrace the darkness and light candles whenever and wherever you can. Candles and twinkle lights should be white though (see Rule #1). 

One of the things that is particularly Scandinavian is to put out advent candles at Christmas. These candles are usually white (of course) and are often placed in containers with some greenery added and lined up on a windowsill or down the middle of the table. They are lit on each Sunday in advent. Simple, but effective, right?

Hege Greenall-Scholtz

Kjerstis Lykke

5. Decorate with shiny and sparkly materials. Anything sparkly and reflective and shiny works with your Christmas decor - things like glass and crystal jars and vases or mirrors or silver, gold, or brass plates and bowls. It totally makes sense to use reflective materials that will bounce light around the room when there is so little daylight. Mixing metals is totally fine, as is using tarnished or worn silver or brass. In fact it is preferred as then it doesn't look too perfect. Shiny and sparkly is definitely an easy tip to follow.

My Scandinavian Home

Stylizimo

6. Use elements from nature.  It seems like every room I looked at had something from the forest incorporated into the decor. Things like evergreen boughs, pine cones, moss, wheat sheaves, or even bare twigs, and flowering bulbs. I love the price tag on most of these items as they can often be collected when you go for a walk through the woods or from the backyard.

Stylizimo

Daniella Witte

Planete Deco

7. Use natural fabrics like linen, burlap, wool, and sheepskin.  Nothing seems cozier than a wool blanket or a sheepskin rug. Burlap and linen are more about the texture as the loose weave and soft wrinkles make your room seem more relaxed. 

Planete Deco

Stylizimo

8. Decorate with food. I think one of my favourite traditions in Scandinavian Christmas decorating is using food such as fruit, nuts, and especially cookies to decorate with. The cookies are usually spice cookies that are cut out into pretty shapes and decorated with simple white icing. Sometimes the decorations are in the form of a gingerbread house, but again not usually the wild sugarfests that we often make, but rather houses decorated with restrained white icing. I love how decorating with food really makes it a multi-sensory event. Can't you just smell the cinnamon!

Skonahem

Digdigs

9. Include handmade touches. I love that there are often homemade paper crafts hung on the tree or in the windows of the rooms I looked at. There were things like folded paper stars and small paper cones filled with candies or felt hearts. I especially love the paper cones and may have to make some for my tree this year.

Seventeen doors

Bonordica

My Scandinavian Home

10. Hang a big star in your window. The stars might be made of paper or metal or even plastic and some are lit and some aren't, but they seem to be pretty mandatory ... and pretty lovely.

Stylizimo

11. Be a minimalist. This last tip is definitely the hardest for someone like me. Even if it isn't in your nature to be a minimalist you need to do your best to keep things simple. Like the old adage to look in the mirror before going out the door and remove one item, in Scandinavian decorating you should look around the room and remove about a hundred items. Less is definitely more!

Lantliv via Planete Deco

I love the Scandinavian way of decorating - the simplicity, the coziness, and the homey touches. I've seen a lot of people talking about Scandinavian decorating the last few years so I think I'm not the only one that finds it appealing. You can see my attempt at creating a Scandinavian mantel in this post. Is it a style that you like and try to use in your home?

Trees and Dogs

I have two random things to share with you today so I thought I would lump them together into one post. 

First, in art class we carved lino blocks and printed the designs onto blue-striped IKEA tea towels. You can see them in the photos above - the green trees are mine and the red trees are my mom's. Have you ever done any printing? It is a very satisfying project.

I printed evergreen trees down the sides of the tea towel and then dipped a pencil eraser into silver paint and dotted the sky with stars (I'm sure you knew those were stars, right?)  It is a fun project and I like that you end up with a useful item.  I'm using mine as a table runner rather than a tea towel. 

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It was the husband's birthday last Friday and we celebrated on Friday with dinner out and on Saturday with lunch out with the family.

It was a significant birthday so the kids and I went all out and did some extra special things for him. One of the things we did was list all his accomplishments on a long paper. It was so long I hung it across the lights in the dining room. We had fun reading them together and adding more things we had forgotten to the list.

And the really big news is that the husband is getting a dog for his birthday. And no I didn't wrap a dog up in that big box on the table - it if filled with dog paraphernalia. The husband has wanted a dog since Juno passed away in February, but I have been reluctant to get another one because of the difficulties when you want to go away. There is always give-and-take in a marriage and since this was the husband's heart's desire it seemed the perfect time to give it to him (well the permission to get his heart's desire anyway, as getting a dog is turning out to be quite the process). 

A funny thing happened - on Wednesday I bought a dog collar to give him as a placeholder for the actual dog and tucked it carefully away. The next day I realized I had no idea where I had put the present (honestly, I can be so absent-minded sometimes) and the husband's birthday was the next day. So at lunch on Friday I had to run out and buy another placeholder. Since I was in the pet store anyway, I decided to buy a bunch of things like a dog bed and a leash and some food which is why the box was so big. 

Now we just need to find the right little dog - one that will fit the adorable coat and sweater I bought for it!

Christmas Craft Party

Last weekend was my third annual Christmas Craft Party. There's nothing better than spending an evening sitting around eating and chatting with friends from my art class while we make Christmas crafts.

So here is what we made this year.

1. TWIG SANTAS

What you need:

• twigs and sticks in a range of thicknesses
• acrylic paint - red, flesh-coloured, white
• corn starch
• paint brushes
• trays for the paint 
• popsicle sticks for mixing
• black Sharpie

This was probably my favourite craft of the evening. My Mom and I collected twigs at the cottage about a month ago so we could make these Santas. We chose twigs that were a range of thicknesses from about a pencil size to a couple of centimeters across. We used the large clippers to cut the end on an angle to form the hat. Then we painted the hat red and the face using flesh-coloured paint. We mixed corn starch with white paint to make the beard fluffy and we added eyes using a Sharpie. I made more Santas on the day after the party (it isn't easy for me to get much done during the party itself so I took advantage of having everything set up and I crafted the next day too before I cleaned up) and on some of the Santas I used fluffy white wool for the beard, instead of paint.

2. TWIG LETTERS

This craft really got everyone being creative and making different things which is always fun to see what everyone does.

What you need:

• twigs and sticks in a variety of sizes and shapes
• wire to hold the sticks in a round shape
• ribbon, wool, twine, baker's string, fake berries to decorate the letters
• blocks of wood
• clippers, scissors, wire cutters
• glue guns

My Mom and I gathered all the twigs we would need for this craft at the cottage too. I kept them in the garage so they would stay pliable which seemed to work. I want to give a shout-out to Lowe's and Rona as both stores gave me wood blocks for free and even cut a few scrap pieces up for me. I was so grateful as I didn't want to spend a lot on the craft projects and I had initially tried one other hardware store and they had said no, so I was very happy when Rona and Lowe's were so generous.

I made more letters on Sunday. I finished up "NOEL" which you can see in the back row of the first photo that is missing an "L" (get it, no 'L'. Ha! Ha! I crack myself up) and made "JOY" as well.

3. CARVED ORANGES

We've done this craft for three years in a row so this will be the last one, but I really wanted to do it again so I would have a bowl full of carved oranges. I only had four and that just isn't a good number to display so now I have seven and I'm good to go.

What you need:

• oranges
• carving set
• bowl to put peels in

The only trick to this craft is to make sure the oranges are really dried out before putting them on display. I do that by putting them on our floor heat vent for two weeks and then they are fine.

I have to say that this craft party is one of my favourite Christmas activities. I love sitting around chatting and visiting with people who like to play with twigs. 

By the way, if you are curious what we made in previous years, you can see them here, here, and more details here.