On Friday we had some friends from college over (Hi Lindsey and Jon!).  They brought us these cute little birch votive holders from Crate and Barrel…

Which go so nicely with my little Crate and Barrel pumpkin-scape…

My favorite part of these candles is that they’re stitched up the back, corset style…

I put the candles with the pumpkins, which are all still on my buffet since I tried setting the table on Halloween and Macky highly disapproved.

And by disapproved, I mean he rolled all over my clean table cloth then proceeded to knock coasters off the table. He also apparently tried to carry the mini pumpkins off the table, as evidenced by this bite mark I just noticed in one of the pictures…

You know the book/movie Marley & Me? I think I better start writing Macky & Me.

Okay enough with being photo detective and back to my fall table! We have some place mats and I recently picked up a brown table cloth, but I would like a runner.  Our dining room chairs are shades of browns and blues, so anything too holiday themed isn’t going to compliment the room.  Which is probably good, because I’m not into typical holiday colored things.  So I was excited to see this runner that I could use year round and also goes with my little pumpkin/candle accessories…

It’s the Eastleigh Green-Teal Runner from Crate and Barrel.  My only problem with this is a) aren’t there enough things from Crate and Barrel in there?  I know I love the place, but I’m looking borderline obsessed and b) it’s pricey considering I’d probably need the largest size with both extensions in my table.  So chances are, I’m going to pass on the C&B runner, but I figured I’d share it until I find an alternative 🙂

ps- please excuse the lighting in these pictures… the dramatic lighting in the dining room doesn’t make for the best photo ops!

I mentioned in my last post that I had a new Sunny inspiration…

Since our bedroom is all fancy looking with it’s new floors, I’ve started to think about what I want to do with the room.  Okay, I’ve been thinking about it for months and changing my mind over, and over, and over again.

Originally, we registered for king sized bedding from Macy’s…

We only had a queen sized bed, but we weren’t sure if we’d be able to afford nice, new king sized bedding when we moved into the new house.  So when we spotted this, we both loved it and wanted it.  Problem was, it was discontinued.  Since we are picky, my mom ran out the next day and hunted down all of the pieces, had them mailed to her and gave it to me at my bridal shower.

I still love the refreshing teal tones in this bedding, as well as the crisp white, but I have a habit of decorating with blue.  Our family room/kitchen is blue, the dining room and living room have shades of blue.  I didn’t want to get trapped into the blues/browns again.  I love white crisp bedding and against our new dark floors I knew white would look great.  But with pets, white is very hard to maintain, as is anything too dark.  So I knew I wanted something primarily white, but I was leaning towards a neutral toned bedroom.

I first wanted this Marimekko Poloneese bedding from Crate and Barrel…

Then I saw it was similar to the bedding in the boys’ room on this season of Jersey Shore…

I was nervous about what was going to go down in those beds this season, so I decided to shop around.

(Btw, I loved the living room area on this season of Jersey Shore with the graphic red/white curtains…)

So some other neutral, patterned bedding I was considering was…

This West Elm bedding which was similar to the above Crate and Barrel bedding.  It’s apparently not available anymore.

I also like the organic factor of this Imperial duvet cover, also from West Elm…

So I was obviously favoring West Elm.  One day a week or two ago, I went to the West Elm website to see if they added any new bedding when I discovered this…

It’s the Octagon jacquard duvet cover… it’s orange and reverses to a side with more white than orange. Given my new love for orange and after spotting this, I decided that I wanted some white and orange bedding.  But this bedding wasn’t exactly doing it for me, so I set out to look around.

Crate and Barrel has an orange and white set, the Marimekko Madison Persimmon duvet…

But it was too orange and not enough white for me.  So I checked my usual places, Target, Pier 1, Ikea, Google, but I couldn’t find anything I loved.  Then in a last ditch effort, I went to Walmart.com…..

Exactly what I had in mind! It’s the Divatex Diamond Duvet Mini Set in Spice, and it also comes in black and white.  The great part is, it was on sale when I ordered it so I paid $35 for a king duvet and shams, plus like $2 to ship it.  The whole ‘mini-set’ aspect (just the duvet & shams) was appealing because I could still use my nice Hotel Collection white sheets and bedskirt that my mom gave us as a wedding gift.   A little mix of high end, a little mix of low end.  Throw some accent pillows on this bad boy and we’re set!

I plan on putting the teal bedding in the guest room, since I still love it and can’t bear to part with it.  And I figure since I plan on using white sheets, I may want to change around the bedding from time to time.  That is, if it goes with my fancy plans for the rest of the room 🙂

I didn’t plan on decorating the inside of our house for any holidays other than Christmas (see our outside fall decor here), but when I spotted these pumpkins at Crate and Barrel I had to have them.

I bought one of the medium sized ones and two of the mini sized ones.  I planned to use them make a whole centerpiece arrangement on our table for our first Thanksgiving.  Then we decided to do an impromptu Halloween gathering Saturday with both of our families, so I figured I’d put them out early.  Problem was, I didn’t have the rest of my table scape ready!  I ran to Target to find the runner I wanted but they were out, so I decided to just stick the pumpkins on our Ikea Stornas buffet for the day.

Then I remembered that we had some tiny pumpkins from the farm I could mix in…

If I only had this blog to document the Ikea dining room furniture fiasco back in April.  Someday I will have to go back and cover the dining room stuff we already have!

At like 11pm on Friday night I decided to make chocolate covered pretzels.  Mike thought I was crazy, but I love decorating…and decorating things I can eat?? even better! So I set out to do the pretzels on my own, but Mike ended up enjoying the process and helped out.  Maybe even dominated the pretzel game…

We started getting creative along the way and decided to smash up some of the halloween candy we bought…

So now we still have more than two full bags of halloween candy, leftover pumpkin pie, chocolate cake, pumpkin roll, pumpkin cake, chocolate covered animal crackers that my mom bought and some chocolate covered pretzels left.  The next kid to ring the doorbell gets a piece of cake….

Happy Halloween everyone!

Yesterday, Sara from House Bella posted this entry about making pom flowers. What’s a pom flower you ask?  Well I asked the same thing and luckily Sara included a picture and some links…

I watched the YouTube video and saw how easy it was to make these adorable and stylish pom flowers.  I think I am going to have to make some because…

a) my cats eat flowers

b) Mike is allergic to many flowers

c) I kill all plants/flowers

Prior to Sara’s post, my solution was to buy some fake hydrangeas.  I don’t like fake flowers, but I love hydrangeas and though we planted some, I will have to wait until the spring for them to bloom. I figured fake hydrangeas don’t look all that fake, so I’d give it a shot.  I stuck two on our mantle in vases to test them out…

That vase is the Mira vase from Crate and Barrel, which they currently only have in purple. Which means I may have to buy another one in purple…

A close up of the fake flowers.  See, they’re not so bad afterall…

Some of my failed missions in flower owning include: (pictures via iPhone)

The time I bought these flowers, which you may recognize as the blue version of the flowers I used for my sister in law’s baby shower…

Macky chewed them so they were photographed in the bathroom, where they were safe.  Until they caused Mike to have a sneezing attack so bad that we had to leave the house.  The flowers walked out with us and went into the trash.  I tried. The vase is from Ikea a few years back.

So then I got a few Ikea plants, which we had in the condo and I always called Miss Leafy.  We bought 3 when we moved here to line up on our mantle. As of 2 weeks ago, this is what was left of them…

The fake hydrangeas are my mantle substitute… for now.  I think I’m moving them… I have house A.D.H.D.

So special thanks to Sara for the suggestion and accompanying links!  Families like us need some stylish fake flowers. Especially since I once killed this Ikea cactus…

Really guys, I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Before we even bought this house, I knew wanted to get a rainbow of mums to put on either side of our steps in the fall. Like a gradient of yellow, orange, red and purple. So one day a few weeks ago, we set out to the garden center to pick some up. When we got there, there was no shortage of mums, but they were in pumpkin or otherwise fall themed pots. Really I’m not a scrooge, I have just never been a fan of those type of holiday decorations. So I searched for other pots, with no luck. I knew we’d be busy the next couple of weekends, so I thought my mum dreams would have to wait another year and we’d live with our sad spring/summer leftovers.

Then! I went to the Crate & Barrel outlet sale over the weekend and scored some awesome, year round Soleil Planters.

I also picked up this bird because it was $5 and it was adorable. Mike said he only agreed because it was $5. The bird has nothing to do with this post but I saw it on the website and had to brag about getting it.

I only bought 2 pots because I didn’t want a bunch of the same one and I figured I’d just accumulate pots I randomly find places. So I decided to get just 2 mums for my pots to put by my door, since Mike and I agreed after planting and mulching during the hottest summer ever, we were done planting for the year.

Fast forward to Wednesday when our floors were done being installed a little early, so I decided I’d go get my 2 mums. Driving there I thought of those 4 dead zinnias in a row and how I should reeeally put mums there. Then I remembered the blood, sweat, tears and more sweat that went into planting them, but that didn’t stop me. I ended up getting 8 mums, knowing Mike was not home to help me, I was overtired and I had sawdust and an office to clean.

Turns out it only took me an hour or so to make the house fall ready. I planted the mums…

Then I arranged some pumpkins we got from the farm…

Hung the Harvest Wreath from Crate and Barrel…I know, I know, I could have made one for much less! But it’s already October and my free time these days is minimal…

I also bought the wreath hook from Crate and Barrel… I know, I know I could have saved myself the $10, but it matches our door quite well and will be used for other seasons…

To save a little dough, I passed up the Crate and Barrel doormats and instead went to my usual doormat stop- Target.

And tada! House was fall-ified in a little more than an hour.

The only thing I didn’t do was get some fall pillows for the brown chairs on the porch. If I ever pulled out my sewing machine I would make some. Definitely a revision to make for next year, when I hope to do this in September…