I was featured!

The sweet and wonderful Jami at Freckled Laundry was kind enough to feature my super-simple upholstery webbing Christmas card holder at her Air Your Laundry Friday Party this week!!

This was a total SQUEEE!!!! moment on my part since I'm brand-new to blogging and have never been featured anywhere.  Thank you so much, Jami!

Please visit Jami at Freckled Laundry to see her delicious French-inspired home and textile projects. You won't be disappointed by all the lovelies and you won't meet a nicer gal anywhere! :) 

Tannenbaum Travels

We traveled on Sunday to the western part of North Carolina to cut a fresh Christmas tree.  North Carolina is renowned for its Frasier Firs and I love these trees. They are simply the perfect Christmas tree, in my opinion.
 
We drove to Boone since it's only about 2-1/2 hours away.  It was cold here at home when we left, but it was absolutely frigid in Boone!  Their high was our low that day. 

What a view!

After grabbing a bite to eat, we visited a farm on the recommendation of my husband's co-worker. Though it was slightly off the beaten path, there were a lot of people there doing the same thing we were.

We ambled up a hill, found a lovely tree, flagged down a cutter and snapped a few pictures while waiting.

 

Little boy played while the guys baled the tree.

Rapscallion alert!

Then we paid for and loaded the tree, and dove as quickly as we could into the warm cab of the truck!

My son and I then slept pretty much the entire way home. (Sorry, honey!) The cold will take it right out of you! ;)

P.S.--Yesterday I read Donna at Funky Junk Interiors's excellent tutorial series on photographing with a point-and-shoot. She uses Picasa to edit her photos and so I played around with it to enhance these photos. I'm in love!  Thanks for the great info, Donna!

Country Living Series: Heating with Wood

Though this blog is still in its infancy, I realized I had yet to actually write anything that really pertained to "country living." Now, the general plan for Carolina Country Living is to cover a hodge-podge of topics that interest me (and hopefully you), but I decided it's high time this blog lived up to its name, at least for one post!  For that reason, I've decided to start a series of periodic entries about aspects of living in the country. This is the first entry in that series.

I snuggled on the couch today, reading some lovely blogs (see my blog list for my favorites) and watching a beautiful snow fall. Though it was quite nippy outside, I was roasty-toasty thanks to a potbelly stove full of bone-dry white oak.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Hi, I'm Erin, and I heat my house with a woodstove.  :)  Now, we're not so "country" here that heating with a woodstove is our only option. We do, in fact, have central heat and air, but we made the mistake three years ago when building this place of installing a gas furnace.

See,  this is what the living room and dining room area looks like at my house. 

Note the height of the ceiling--it extends beyond what I could even capture in the picture! We obviously didn't think through the ramifications of a 20-plus foot peak. All we saw were gorgeous timber beams. Silly us.  

Even with a several ton heating unit, the heat will run all day at 70 degrees but the air around you will feel lukewarm at best in since the hot stuff rises beyond the livable space.  And to add insult to injury, it costs an arm and a leg to keep the house tepid thanks to the ever-rising cost of liquid propane gas. 

After staying home with my baby in a chilly house for our first winter (and me turning into a miserable, cranky person who was always cold!), my husband and I decided something else had to be done; a woodstove was our answer. 

Ours, as you could probably tell from the photos, is a log house. The potbelly was a perfect fit for a cabin, plus we were working with a limited area of space and needed a stove that was more vertical that horizontal. 

Fits like a charm!  And even looks cute decorated for Halloween!

I won't go into the boring details of my husband building the hearth, or the installation of the stove, but suffice it to say, it was an arduous task that's ultimately been worthwhile. The stove is a simple cast-iron affair that throws some serious heat and we can now heat our entire home on wood alone. We'll flick on the heat every now and again, but there's nothing more satisfying that having a house warmed by fire, hearing the soft roar of the flames inside the fire box.

Before I start painting too romantic a picture of life with a woodstove, I do have to say heating with wood requires a willingness to do a good bit of manual labor. My husband built a simple woodshed in the spring of 2009 and we spent that month of May splitting and stacking wood we picked up for free via Craigslist ads for downed trees. We spent many a weekend in the early part of that year driving in rural parts of surrounding counties cutting up fallen trees. How's that for quality family time! :)  

This year, we were fortunate to find a huge oak that was struck by lightning on my parents' property, which is adjacent to our land. My husband chainsawed the tree apart, I carted the hunks of wood to our place, and then we split it last month. 

I'm sure some of you are thinking I'm out of my mind for doing so much just to heat my house. I may very well be, so I won't rule that out! However, I'm a pretty frugal person at heart, so apparently those sensibilities outweigh the desire to spend money on LP (which runs more than $3 a gallon these days!) or avoid hard work. And let me tell you, transporting and stacking wood is a full-body workout.

However, one aspect of living in the country, and having a country/self-sufficient mentality, means having to work to get some of the things you want.  Working in the woods (and having my sweet little boy by my side slashing limbs and exerting all that boy energy), enjoying the bounty of Mother Nature as I listen to the calls of birds and observe other woodland creatures, and using my strength and and able-bodiedness (and literally feeling it to my bones on some days) to help provide for my family's comfort are all very satisfying endeavors. But knowing I am able to heat my house through my own work? To be self-sufficient in that realm when so many of us take for granted that our homes are comfortably warm? That epitomizes life in the country to me!

Spontaneous Crafting

Awhile back I saw this neato Christmas card hanger made by Gail at My Repurposed Life. I loved it instantly because it was made with upholstery webbing! However, after two unsuccessful visits to the local Dollar Trees to procure the curly ornament hooks Gail used to actually hold the cards, I figured it just wasn't in the cards (oooh, bad pun) this year.

Fast forward to today when I was decorating the house: I realized we no longer had a serviceable card holder and therefore nothing in which to display our first Christmas card of 2010.  Crud!

I looked around the house, pondering a solution, and then remembered I had a 50-pack of clothespins in the laundry room Hoosier cabinet. My brain shifted quickly into gear and I grabbed my stash of upholstery webbing, a wad of twine, the trusty glue gun and proceeded to do the following:

Cut a length of webbing to fit the area where the holder would go.

Hot glued a short piece of twine to the top of the strip to create the main hanger.

Ran a line of hot glue on the webbing and folded over the top edge 

to create a hem and hide the ugly twine ends.

Repeated the previous step at the bottom to neaten that edge.

 

Hung up the holder and attached my first Christmas 

card of the season with a clothespin!

My spontaneous craft-bustion!

Linking to:

Air Your Laundry Friday at Freckled Laundry
Catch As Catch Can at My Repurposed Life

No-Sew Fabric Advent Calendar

I’m finally recovered from Thanksgiving (and my son only going to preschool for one day last week, as opposed to the usual three…) and am ready for Christmas!

And how could I not be after seeing all the Christmas eye candy in blogland? Wow, I have seen so.much.good.stuff. out there in the last few weeks, I have to consciously practice some restraint and *not* compile a gargantuan list of crafts to make, or decorating vignettes to attempt. (Okay, so I may have a mental list because my mind is always awhirl with project fantasies, but that'll remain just that for the sake of my sanity!)

Since I want to keep these next few weeks relatively simple, so as to enjoy the lead-up to Christmas, the one big project I decided to do this year was an advent calendar. I grew up with paper ones—particularly Tasha Tudor calendars, as my mom simply adores her—and it was such a joy to anticipate opening the little paper doors each morning as a kid.

After seeing wonderful inspirations for fabric advent projects at Rosebud & Bluebells and Maple & Magnolia, I cobbled together my own hybrid version utilizing a khaki-and-cream ticking and budget-friendly, linen-look fabric.

Now, I have to interject for the sake of transparency that I actually put off starting this project because I’m a ridiculous wuss. See, my first inspiration, Donna’s calendar/garland, involves {gasp} SEWING! 

Rosebud & Bluebells

And I don’t have my own sewing machine, and even if I did, I can never remember how to thread the bloody thing, and then I always end up jamming the needle at some point which means pulling out the bobbin…GAH! I wasted at least three days by going through these sorts of mental gymnastics and hand wringing.

Fortunately, that’s when I ran across Susan’s calendar, which shared a tangentially similar feel to Donna’s thanks to the use of neutral fabric and stamped numbers.

Maple & Magnolia

However, this calendar required much less sewing and employed hot glue (schweet!) for attaching the pockets to the backing. That was a total relief, because just before finding Susan’s calendar, I was seriously considering stringing paper envelopes embellished with Christmas paper and calling it a day.  That’s how scared I was of sewing.

So, I bought a handy-dandy quilting square tool that allowed me to trace perfect 4-1/2” squares on the linen-ish fabric. After cutting them out, I stenciled the numbers in traditional red and green using craft paint, laid out the squares on the ticking to determine the size of the overall of the calendar, and marked the edges for cutting.  

At this point, an absolutely beautiful and ironic turn of events occurred. After all my worry over sewing this thing, followed by the grudging acceptance of the fact I could and should at least hem the ticking (my friend Sara had her sewing machine out and was willing to help this absolute novice), I looked at the pinking shears I used earlier to cut out the pockets, and realized I could just cut out the ticking with it. SAY WHAT? So I cut out the ticking with the shears, attached the dowel with dabs of hot glue, and there were no needles or thread involved with the making of my advent calendar!

There you have it. I have successfully evaded yet another sewing project.

I added the twine hanger, rick-rack and felt holly embellishment to finish it off—using hot glue, of course.

In each pocket is a square of parchment paper with an activity. I was going for an old-timey feel (we do live in a cabin after all) and so I printed the following activities in Blackadder font on the paper to complete the calendar:

• Make Christmas cookies
• See Christmas lights at Tanglewood
• Watch “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”
• Go the mountains and get a fresh Christmas tree
• Make a Christmas wreath for the front door
• Paint sun-catcher Christmas ornaments
• Listen to Christmas music with the lights off (except for the Christmas tree)
• Make chocolate soothers with marshmallows
• Stud oranges with cloves
• Deliver cookies to family and friends
• Make pinecone bird feeders
• Take canned and non-perishable food to OCIM
• Snuggle together and read Christmas books
• Buy a new family Christmas ornament
• See Santa Claus
• Go to the Mebane Christmas parade
• Set out the Christmas village
• Write and mail Christmas cards
• Make a paper chain garland
• Watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas”
• Make salt dough ornaments
• Give the gift of a hug and a smile
• Go to the Duke Chorale Christmas Concert
• Read “Twas Night Before Christmas” (illustrated by Tasha Tudor) and leave out cookies and milk for Santa

With my son almost four, Christmas is getting more and more exciting for us with each passing year. He was pretty cognizant of what was happening at Christmas last year, but he’s even more so now and I’m enjoying his unbridled enthusiasm. And now that he’s also interested in doing crafts and other activities, having the advent calendar allows me to focus our creative energies and really enjoy these next several weeks with him.  

Okay, off to start pulling out the Christmas decorations. I don’t begin decorating for Christmas until December 1^st.  Does anybody out there still do this?  I think I may be the only one!

Linking to:
Transformation Thursdays at The Shabby Chic Cottage
Air Your Laundry Friday at Freckled Laundry
Catch As Catch Can at My Repurposed Life