Bird Cage

Also, he hung up our wooden birdcage.

Now I've Moved In

We moved into our house with many things still to finish. And then last winter we were tired of all the building and the house showing and the moving. And then it was warm and time to focus on doing things outside. So, one reason and another, we hadn't gotten around to hanging many decorative things on the walls. But just lately my husband hung a bunch of framed prints on the walls. And he hung up our clock:



I said, "Now I've moved in."

My grandma gave us the clock as a wedding gift. She gave me the cup and saucer as a bridal shower gift. It was my great-grandmother's.



When I was a kid, my grandma had that cup and saucer along with two others displayed on her kitchen wall, all of which had been her mother-in-law's. Two belonged to my youngest aunts and one belonged to my grandma. I admired those china cups so much. My grandma told me I could have hers when she didn't need it any more.

Years went by. A lot of my grandma's stuff got packed up and moved around as she was sometimes in assisted living and sometimes at home. I hadn't seen her cup and saucer in years.

Then she gave it to me at one of my bridal showers. I cried.

Then she gave us the clock to display it in. It has hung in the dining room of our first apartment and of our first house. Now it's in our dining room here. It makes the kids really happy to have that familiar object up again.

Me, too.

Change of Seasons

Yesterday I took down my Thanksgiving decorations...



...to make way for Christmas.









The last ornament is in memory of my grandma, who loved to see the birds that came to her bird feeders.

Decorating with Compost

I ordered myself a compost keeper:



No, that's not my kitchen, just the catalog picture.

We started composting last summer after we moved to the country. We kept it in an old ice cream pail on the counter. It serves the purpose, and it was free. But if you know me, you know I like fancy. Even though I usually have piles of dirty dishes on my kitchen counter so that my kitchen isn't lovely to look at, I want to be able to make it lovely. And an ice cream pail as a permanent countertop decoration is not going to cut it.

So I kept looking at this ceramic, lidded, charcoal-filtered compost holder in a catalog but didn't want to spend the money yet last year. Then I stopped saving scraps for the winter because I didn't feel like trudging through snowbanks to bring it to my pile. And then this spring I went for the fancy container. It's nice except that they made it with a little lip at the bottom, a handy little place for junk to get stuck. So I'm lining it with produce bags - the "reuse" part of the recycling mantra.

Teapots

I love teapots and teacups. And china in general.

I finally arranged my teapot collection on top of my kitchen cabinets. They've been just kind of sitting up there for, oh, 11 months now....



Okay, strictly speaking, it's not just teapots. That first one is a coffee pot. It's part of my set of china.

In the next picture, the one on the left is a teapot. The one on the right is a pitcher my sister painted to match my kitchen curtain (which has not yet gone up in this house).


Then another teapot, then another pitcher:


Then two more teapots:


I still need to come up with a way to raise them up higher. I didn't have crown molding in my old kitchen, so you could see them much better. But I love the crown molding! I think if I just stuck the pots up on blocks of wood, they'd be in danger of falling off. The kids' bedrooms are directly above, and when they run and jump, things vibrate. My husband thinks he could put little sides on blocks of wood so that they'd stay in place. But that's hardly his highest priority now that spring is here. Someday they'll be set up perfectly.

I also want probably two more teapots - they're kind of spread out now that I have such a nice big bank of cabinets. My sister-in-law said she's making me one, which is so awesome. She makes beautiful ceramics.