Picture frames!

Does anyone else have an aversion to those picture collages that are so popular?  I love them, but every time I show one to Matt he gets a headache!  We have a lot of blank walls in our house.  Partly because we painted and I never put everything back up, and partly because my husband doesn't like the look of cluttered walls.  I've actually come to embrace the sparsity. I've decided I would rather have nothing on the wall instead of just filling the space if I didn't love it.  But I LOVE photographs.  I have been wanting some pictures of the kids up for a long time.  I bought these frames at Michael's when they were having a buy one get one free sale.  I saw someone do something similar at their house and I loved the look.  It took a long time to finally get them hung up (with help from Marti of course).  Even with paper cut to the right size with the nail holes marked it was HARD to get everything lined up and level and there are a few extra holes.  

 Matt decided he could handle this.  I love the ornate details and that they are BIG.  The older I get the more I like a few BIG things instead of a bunch of little things on a wall.  I might switch them to more candid small group shots later but this is what I have up for now.  The main wall in our family room has NEVER had much on it until now!

I meant to take another picture with the couch in the picture after I folded Mt. Laundry but that didn't happen. Shocker.  I put them up a little higher so the kids won't bump into them.  I'm so happy to have them up!

Trick or Treat Fireplace

Have I ever told you that the space above our fireplace- the focal point of the whole house- was blank for three whole years?  Should we do a painting? Mirror? Clock?  And when we finally did agree on a picture it was a picture of us?  How vain is that, right?  I mean it shows that our family is important.  

Whenever we get new family pictures I order a 20x30 print from Costco (it has to be off a super nice camera to turn out well at that size) for $10.   I had it matted and framed at Hobby Lobby for about $40 which isn't bad for that large and much cheaper than all the paintings we were looking at.  My sister-in-law made us the Whitmer sign for Christmas and even remembered to give me the vinyl names when the twins were born.

Anyway, the real reason I was taking pictures of my fireplace is that I finished the trick or treat banner- even a couple of weeks before Halloween.  Of course I cut out the letters and bought the fabric last year, but oh well.  It's a knock off of Crockery Shed like all my good ideas.  After I cut out the letters I thought I should have done, "spooky" or "boo" or "eek" or even "Halloween" would have been shorter.  I also wish I'd done "or" smaller to fit on one triangle.  I followed the directions for the banner from this link.  I've made one other banner and I have a few others I might make.  They aren't too hard but they do take some time.

I've been wanting the fall leaves garland for a while but could never find them on clearance after fall- so this year I used my 50% off coupon and bought at the beginning of the season.

The candles in the fireplace are a Crockery Shed copy cat as well, I bought mine at Wal-Mart.  Picture me sitting on the floor in the candle aisle for about an hour messing with the design.  I'm a little obsessed- I mean inspired, by Crockery Shed.  I saw a cute link where they filled their fireplace with a ton of different sized pumpkins for fall.  So fun.

Another fun fact- we've never used our fireplace for a fire- not once. Boring huh?  In our defense it is summer about 9 months of the year and we never had it inspected to make sure it's safe to use and there are a lot of "no burn" days because of pollution anyway.  It's basically just a very large decoration- that eliminates any usable corners in our family room- but does provide some extra (albeit hard) seating when needed.  The kids use it as a sort of toy table as well.  Matt wants to tear it out if we ever get around to getting new flooring.  We'll see.