It is so beautiful when you walk in a home and you feel a sense of warmth and comfort.  I love to create an environment that is welcoming and inviting.   From flower presentation, scent and an overall warm vibe.  Keeping it simple and presenting a natural home environment is what I am about.  I do put thought into flowers, plants and scent. I so love how every season and holiday gives me an opportunity to enhance my home with a little added touch of design, change and surprise.

I am very spontaneous with how I decorate and breaking the normal traditional way we are surrounded by everyday.  Decorating should always be organic and inspired by the environment you live in.  My recent trip to Paris preparing for a dinner party I visited a local florist and was inspired to decorate the dinner table with what was affordable and seasonal.  Bringing the outdoors in is so easy and rewarding.  You do not need to spend a lot of money on flowers and arrangements.  This table was created by a bunch of seasonal greens to romance the appetizers.

Every Christmas I wanted to add ornaments to our tree that would tell a story and resonate memories every year.  My first idea was to take art my boys brought home from school and create ornaments.  Also, the wallet size annual school pictures putting them in frames to hang on our tree.

To add an organic touch, I made ornaments out of pinecones. I gathered pine cones and glued natural twine into loops on the pine cone to hang them.  Another wonderful project is to take plain wreaths and decorate with the cones.

I have been finding the mini led string lights are fun to work with around the fireplace, wrapped around garland or a wreath…sometimes Christmas lights on Oskar! 

An amazing lasting touch is finding beautiful dried flowers that are fitting for the season are so priceless like these gorgeous burgundy hydrangeas.

GIFT  WRAPPING

The holiday season seams to create an environmental nightmare.  From the boxes, to tissue paper, wrapping paper, ribbons, etc.  This has always been a creative challenge for me.  I am known to wrap gifts in old newspaper or burlap bags.  The past few years I have found it exciting to collect pillowcases that have been marked down.  Gifts should be something thoughtful down to the wrapping.  This year, I am collecting dish towels…the challenge will be to make sure the gifts are the right size for a dish towel.  One year I found reindeer pillowcases on sale at Restoration Hardware for 1.99 each!   Another idea I am thinking about is indigo dyeing old white pillowcases…what ideas do you have?