It is the classic Christmas combo, but I rarely decorate for the holidays with red and green.
But, that didn’t stop me from having some fun with a few vintage goodies I had on hand.
Sometimes it’s fun to play around with the classics.
Even just a couple of vintage books can seem festive in the right colors.
Best wishes to you for a festive Christmas Eve!
Sue brought this darling little rustic box to the Carriage House sale last fall, and no one bought it. Can you imagine? Did no one see its potential? It was only priced at $6, so I know it wasn’t overpriced.
So rather than let Sue take it back home with her after the sale, I purchased it from her myself. I felt it was calling out for some finishing touches, so I decided to add a stencil and some vintage drawer pulls as handles on the sides. I was dying to use my newest stencil, which is this one (and you can order it here).
I’ve mentioned this stencil in a couple of posts. It says “Family and Friends gather here”, which makes it rather inappropriate for bedroom furniture, no? I’ve been searching Craigslist high and low for a buffet or sideboard to paint since that would be the perfect piece for such a sentiment, but haven’t found anything yet. Meanwhile, I realized that a portion of the stencil would be perfect for the side of this box.
I stenciled it using black craft paint, and freshly stenciled it looked like this.
I sanded it to give it a more authentic look, and then finished it off with a little Miss Mustard Seed furniture wax. Next, I added some old cup pulls to the sides of the box just to add a little more interest.
Since I was on a roll and I had all of my supplies out and ready to go, I decided to do some more stenciling on boxes.
That box in the middle is covered in galvanized metal, the other two are both wood.
There are so many possibilities for boxes like these. For example, they make great containers for storing all of your Jeanne d’Arc magazines.
Or add some vintage faux berries and a candle to create an awesome centerpiece.
I like using containers like this in my pantry to store the more mundane household goods, like paper towels.
I use this one to corral stuff on my coffee table; kleenex, remotes, coasters, etc.
These boxes make great container gardens for the winter window sill too.
The possibilities are endless!
Sometimes I have what I think are brilliant ideas for a blog post. I take on a project, shoot a bunch of photos, and in the end I only have one or two pictures that I like. It doesn’t feel like I have enough for a full on blog post. Such has been the case with most of my holiday decorating this season.
I was going to do a full post on the winter window box, but I really only had two decent photos.
It looks great in person. The lights are pretty at night. But the photos just felt sort of blah.
I also decorated the Eastlake dresser that is next to my back door.
I picked up the small silver ornaments in Germany and the vintage camera was a gift from my friend Sue.
The vintage Christmas postcard in the typewriter is from 1926, and was mailed from Notodden, Norway to Minneapolis with a Christmas message written in Norwegian. God Jul!
I’ve also added a festive holiday pop to my Kitchen Scale buffet.
I was hoping to have some more photos to share with you, but it’s been so gloomy here lately that I can’t get any good pictures.
The forecast calls for sun this weekend though, and I hope to get a few projects cranked out that I can share with you next week. Stay tuned.
Vienna is a handsome, lively city, and pleases me exceedingly. – Frederic Chopin
The first stop on our Romantic Danube river cruise after boarding our boat in Budapest was Vienna. I really should have better photos of Vienna for you. Unfortunately, Vienna is the one stop in our recent vacation where being on a river cruise was a definite disadvantage. That’s because we only had one day there, and the day in question was rainy and gloomy. Vienna has so much to offer, and we saw only saw a fraction of it. We did see some beautiful copper domes though.
And we saw the famous fiakers, or horse drawn carriages, although not many were taking a ride on such a dreary day.
As part of our morning guided tour, we walked down the pedestrian only shopping street. I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore looking in the shop windows.
I really loved the old lockers in the Chanel window.
Our guide told us that Naomi Campbell had been in Chanel just a few weeks earlier and her driver was fined for driving her down the pedestrian only street. You can read all about that here. Do you suppose she bought a pair of these these pink plaid boots?
Well, clearly I don’t shop in the same places as Naomi Campbell, so I was content to just look through the windows.
Since the weather was so questionable, we decided to spend the afternoon inside in the Imperial Apartments and the Sisi Musuem. If you don’t know the story behind Sisi, or Empress Elisabeth of Austria, hers is actually a rather fascinating story. I think she was the Princess Diana of her day. It was fascinating to learn more about her and to see some of her things, including her dresses and her rooms in the palace.
Later in the day, we visited the Christmas Market in the Rathauspark. By the way, the Rathaus is basically what we would call our City Hall (the irony is not lost on me). My day job is at the Rathaus, but trust me, my Rathaus looks nothing like the one in Vienna.
Anyway, I think my expectations were just too high. All of the brochures made it sound like a magical place full of gluhwein (a spiced, hot wine served in a mug) and handcrafted Christmas gifts. Perhaps it is more magical in the snow than it is in the rain. Perhaps I am jaded. In the end, it was just a lot of tacky, overpriced stuff mixed in with a lot of food booths and it seems I am not a fan of having my wine served hot. Plus, trust me when I say it’s nearly impossible to juggle a camera, an umbrella and a hot mug of gluhwein.
These are pretty, but did I have to go all the way to Vienna to find ornaments like these?
As we made our way around the Christmas Market, the rain just got heavier and heavier. Finally we gave in and returned to our river boat to dry off and warm up. Our next stop was in Melk, home to the famous Abbey. I’ll share that with you soon! Stay tuned.
If you followed my blog last Christmas, you already know that I have a collection of vintage glass Christmas ornaments. I have a small silver tree that I display most of them on. Last year I had a big plan to limit my collection to mainly pink, aqua and green, I wrote about that here (and you can see the full tree on that post as well).
The pink and aqua are definitely still my faves.
So pretty.
I totally adore this little blue one because of its space age theme.
Try to ignore my reflection in the ornament, lol.
But I wasn’t that successful at limiting my collection. I ended up saving all of the silver and gold ones to decorate my dining room.
And I certainly couldn’t part with some of the more unusual ornaments, like these …
A few years ago I used a lot of my plain vintage bulbs to create a wreath.
I have to laugh at the countless reflections of my black and white checked floor that you can see in this close up.
So, in the end I rarely have very many ornaments that I actually want to get rid of. But, sometimes I put some aside for my Carriage House sale. I’m trying to fill this box for next year’s sale.
I just need six more. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for them at garage sales next summer!
I don’t know if you noticed the hat I used to draw names for the winners of the German decorating magazines, but if not, here is a reminder …
I dragged Mr. Q into a hat shop in Germany to purchase it. He looks good in hats … well, some hats. Quite honestly, he really can’t pull off a baseball cap. But hats with a brim generally work well for him. See? Doesn’t he look handsome …
For some reason, we always seem to buy hats for him on vacation. Is it because there are just more hat shops in Europe?
We saw a hat shop in Regensburg with an awesome window display, The Hatter am Dom. They had rows of vintage hat sewing machines (at least I am assuming that is what they are) that immediately caught my eye.
Wouldn’t one of these be fun to display in your craft room?
They also had shelves full of hat blocks, and I admit I would not have know what these were except my friend Michelle of Rose Mille has her own collection of hat blocks and has educated me about them.
I think Michelle would have been in heaven at this shop!
This is not where we purchased Mr. Q’s hat though, his hat is made by Mayser, a German hat maker since 1800. The very helpful clerk who sold it to us said be sure to never use heat to dry it because it could shrink. Good tip, since we often put our winter things on the radiator to dry out when it’s snowy outside.
And what do you do after buying a fabulous hat in Passau? Find a sidewalk cafe to enjoy your favorite beverage (coffee for Mr Q, wine for me) and watch the people go by.
I know Mr. Q will get a lot of use out of his new hat. He’s worn it pretty much every day since we’ve been home. He wore it to visit his grandparents the other day, and he says his 97 year old German grandfather looks even more handsome in it than he does. We should have bought two!
Do you have a lucky number? Mine is 22. Mainly because both the Mr. and I have birthdays on the 22nd. He’s February, I’m November. We tried to get married on the 22nd, but it just didn’t work out.
My lucky number makes an appearance here and there in my decor, like on this old adding machine key that I keep among my colored pencils.
Or this enamel number (purchased at the Round Barn) on the hutch in my craft room.
Sometimes I kind of fake it, like I did with these old billiard balls.
And these sweet little numbers (also from the Round Barn) that hang in a window.
While I am traveling, I also keep an eye out for my lucky number. I simply had to get a shot of this tram while we were in Prague a few years ago.
I was hoping for a no. 22 tram in Budapest, but this is the closest I got.
I did see quite a few other 22’s on my recent vacation though.
My potentially larcenous side tried to assert itself every time I saw one of these. Oh, how I would have loved to have just one as a souvenir!
Too bad I left all of my screwdrivers at home!
It seemed as though I was surrounded by my lucky number in Germany.
Maybe it was a sign (pardon the pun), a good omen for my trip.
How about you, do you have a number that always brings you luck?
I confess I have a bit of a back up of unpainted furniture lingering in my Carriage House. Luckily, we had to purchase a new truck for Mr. Q last summer and we decided to go with something bigger than our old Ford Ranger (to be able to haul more furniture, naturally) and the F150 we bought doesn’t actually fit in the Carriage House. We didn’t think ahead about that part, and now Mr. Q is stuck parking outside and cleaning snow off his vehicle all winter long. But on the bright side, I now have one side of the building to store furniture in. Silver linings, right?
This may be a slippery slope though; I have found myself filling it up with future projects!
I was planning to take a much needed break from painting after my vacation, but my plans for this past Saturday fell through at the last minute and I ended up with some time on my hands. The moment was right to break out the supplies and get some painting done!
So, Mr. Q and I hauled this dresser into the house.
First off, I had the mirror for it. I just removed it before I took the ‘before’ photo to do some repairs to the frame.
If you look closely, can you see how badly damaged the veneer is on the two big drawers? Wait, here is a close up photo …
It didn’t take me long to realize that the veneer on those two drawers couldn’t be saved at all. It obviously really dried out at some point and splintered all over the place. Someone had tried to repair it with a lot of glue, but it just wasn’t going to cut it. So I removed the drawer pulls and that bit of trim on the upper drawer, and then sent them off for a date with Ken and his belt sander. Ken sanded the veneer completely off down to the wood underneath. He was worried I wouldn’t be able to make the drawers look good afterwards, but he underestimates the power of paint and a good stencil!
Right?
OK, let’s talk details. when I took the mirror apart I realized that there were some spots near the bottom that had lost their silvering. Remember the ‘old black magic‘ dresser I painted late last summer? That had a mirror in similar condition, and I lined it with old book pages. I knew that technique would also be perfect on this dresser, which then led to my choice to paint it black. So, it is painted with MMS milk paint in Typewriter. I did not get any chipping on this piece, and I did not use a bonding agent. I think the existing finish was just so dry that the paint nearly behaved as it would on bare wood. I used hemp oil for my topcoat.
I used pages from the old German book I recently purchased at Carver Junk Co to line the mirror, and that led to my decision to use a German stencil as well. I’ve been dying to use a new stencil I purchased recently, but it’s in French for one thing, and for another it translates to “friends and family gather here”, which just seems wrong for a dresser that will likely go in a bedroom. Kind of … wrong, right? So I had to go with my old German standby.
It is one that I have been using for a couple of years, and funny enough “Donau” is German for Danube. And Worth an der Donau is a town on the banks of the Danube, 22 km east of Regensburg, which means I sailed right past it on my trip. Unfortunately, it was probably dark out when we passed by. Isn’t it a small world?
You’d think from the photos that I stenciled this using a white paint, but actually it is Martha Stewart craft paint in Gray Wolf and it’s fairly dark.
I swear. It really is this color. The contrast with the black just makes it appear much lighter. Check the first full on picture of the dresser for a better representation of how it looks. Keep this in mind if you plan to stencil on black. White has far too much contrast.
One last detail, I replaced all of the knobs on this piece with some vintage black glass knobs that I had on hand. I had planned to keep the original hardware, but when I removed the knobs on the upper drawers, I found that two of them were missing their back plates. Thus, you couldn’t tighten them up without them sinking into the holes they were in. While digging around in my stash for replacements, I came across these black knobs and had enough for the whole piece.
At 34″ tall and about 40″ wide, this dresser is actually rather more petite in person than it looks in the photos, although the mirror adds another 37″ to the overall height.
If you need a black dresser with a little German flair, this one is for sale. Leave me a comment if you are interested and I’ll get back to you. Sorry, this one is sold.
Turns out I really have 5 German magazines, not just 4 as I previously thought, and I am giving them all away! So this morning before Mr. Q left for a bookbinding class, I had him help me out.
I don’t have a fancy computerized method for choosing the winners, so we’re kickin’ it old school by drawing names out of a hat. Mr. Q can vouch for me that he drew all 5 fair and square.
I specifically mention that because two of the names that came out of the hat are personal friends of mine. Seriously people. What are the chances? But they can thank Mr. Q, because he drew them. And without further ado, the winners are:
Donna Rogstad, Terri Griffin, Cheryl, Becky and Vicki B!
I’ll be contacting the winners via email to get their mailing addresses. But meanwhile, I truly wish I had enough magazines for everyone! Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment, I enjoyed all of them. Congrats to the winners!
“Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.”
― M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart
Budapest was easily my favorite city visited on our Danube cruise. I have to admit, as the above quote suggests, it is a city almost completely faked … and perhaps that is why I loved it. Why faked? Well, it is estimated that more than 80% of Budapest’s buildings were destroyed or damaged in WWII. All five of the bridges that cross the Danube were blown to bits. Who did all of this damage? Well, pretty much everyone involved. Americans bombed Budapest while it was occupied by the Germans. Germans blew up bridges when they eventually retreated from Budapest. I think the Soviet Union did their fair share of damage as well.
So basically, most sites in Budapest are reconstructions of buildings as they once were. But going back even further, several of the most picturesque locations in Budapest were fakes to begin with. Fisherman’s Bastion, for example, looks like a castle, but really is just a photo op with no substance behind it. It was built between 1895 and 1905 as part of the 1,000 year celebration of the Hungarian state. It was then mostly rebuilt after it was destroyed in WWII.
Vajahunyad Castle (below) is another fake originally built for the 1,000 year celebration, it was never a real castle. But it sure is beautiful. We got up early on a Sunday morning to visit it, and were really glad we did. We had the place mostly to ourselves.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, we hired a private guide in Budapest. Her name was Orsolya, and she was fantastic. Here is a pic my sister took of Mr Q, our guide, me and my mom. If you happen to need a private guide in Hungary, you can find her website here. I really wish we’d had more time in Budapest, because I would have loved to take her Castle tour, or maybe one of her wine tasting tours.
We asked her to take us to some places that might be off the beaten track. We knew we’d see the major sites either on our own, or with our cruise tour. She fulfilled our wishes by taking us to the Metropolitan Ervin Szabo Library. This is a functioning library that is housed in the 19th century Wenckheim Palace.
I suspect she had to pull some strings to get us inside, it seemed to involve her showing some I.D., signing some papers, and asking for the head librarian who had to come and let us in behind a velvet rope. She led us past several floors of rather utilitarian library rooms, until we came upon some of the original palace rooms. Imagine studying for your biology final in these rooms!
Orsolya said she spent many hours studying in this library while at university.
Before we parted ways with our guide, she told us about a coffee shop that was tucked away above a book store on Andrassy Avenue. She pointed out the escalator and said ‘just take it up one floor’. We were able to squeeze in a visit the next day, and were really glad we did.
What? Doesn’t the coffee shop at your local Barnes & Noble look just like this?
It was overcast and drizzly on our last afternoon in Budapest, so while Mr. Q and my mom stayed warm and dry on our Viking river boat, my sister and I decided to take a taxi to the top of Gellert hill and then walk back down again. The panoramic views were lovely, if a bit grey.
The walking path down the hill was gorgeous in the rain.
Overall, Budapest was simply an amazing city. The people were lovely; everyone we dealt with was patient with our total lack of Hungarian and our pathetic attempts to figure out their currency. I can’t tell you how many times I messed up with their money, and the person I was paying handed me back the money they didn’t need (I’m not usually so bad, but 245.78 forints for one U.S. dollar is just not easy math and when a 500 bill is your lowest paper money … well, it was easy to get confused). Not a single waiter sneered at us or was unkind.
The only thing I would have changed about Budapest is that I would have stayed longer. One could easily spend a week to 10 days here, there was so much more we wanted to see but just didn’t have the time. We never were able to tour Parliament or the State Opera House. I would have enjoyed spending some time in their National Gallery and their Museum of Applied Arts. The funicular was closed for repairs, so we weren’t able to ride it (it was scheduled to open the day after we left). We would have liked to visit the zoo, and possibly spend some time in a thermal bath (Budapest is known for them).
Yep, it’s official. We must return, and next time we stay longer!
Stay tuned, next week I’ll share Vienna, the Imperial City, with you.
P.S. Thank you everyone who left a comment to win a German magazine. It sounds like we are all of a like mind and love to get our hands on a good decorating magazine, no matter the language. I’m keeping the drawing open until the end of the day on Friday, then I’ll pick 4 lucky winners and let you know who they are!
q is for quandie 