Over the last thirteen years I’ve developed a love… then hate… then love-hate… and back-to-love relationship with our house.  Is it my dream home?  Not necessarily.  But right about the time I start to get irritated with living here, God presents me with the opportunity to realize we’re right where we’re supposed to be.  This house holds a lot of memories and has taken on many roles over time, and I have finally learned how to decorate this place to make our cavernous rooms feel as homey and inviting as possible.

We still have many of the accessories we used to decorate with when we first moved in.  In particular, we have a set of extra large, medium and small canvases that we painted using colors from the walls in each room – a technique we learned from that old TLC show Trading Spaces.  It was the most effective option we could come up with that would take up space on that giant blank wall.

It worked well enough that we brought them with us to Illinois seven years later, and reused them on another (less) large wall.

But by the time we moved back to California, we were kinda over the whole giant canvas collage thing.  I couldn’t stand to throw out perfectly good canvases, so I just stuck them in my sewing studio until inspiration struck.  We seem to have a thing for large, difficult to decorate walls in our house, and wouldn’t ya know it?  My sewing studio had one too.  I swiped the two smallest canvases and added some buttons to one (the black one with a rainbow B) and fabric, paint, and buttons to the other (the purple one that says “In the beginning, God created…”) to help create this…

The medium-sized yellow one is in the boys’ room.  Ryder (and some masking tape) helped.

Two years ago, I turned the blue one into this (terribly ugly) “Let it Snow” sign.  It was an act of desperation in order to fill some awkward spaces while decorating for winter.  Don’t judge.

This year, I had an equally frustrating space to fill (a very tall triangular niche near our front door), but didn’t want to spend any money on new Christmas decorations.  So I scoured Pinterest (seriously, how did we ever survive before Pinterest?!), and was inspired by several different nativity paintings.  I combined my favorite elements on that ugly old canvas and came up with this…

Crafting is like therapy to me, and it’s really fun to be able to take items from around our house and use them to make something new for our family to enjoy… until the next time inspiration strikes!