A Visit from Cottage and Vine

Rene from Cottage and Vine is one of my dear bloggy buddies, so I couldn't wait to have her do a guest post on my blog...and today is that day!  She has an amazing sense of style, is always working on something around her beautiful home, all while keeping things budget friendly!

I know that after Rene takes you on a little tour of her home below you'll understand why she has so many loyal followers, including me!

Happy holiday everybody!  I am Rene visiting from Cottage and Vine.

Thanks so much to Kat for inviting me over! 

To tell you a little about me, I am married to a wonderful man and we have two boys, 11 and 14.  This is the home they have always known and it is ever changing to meet our changing needs.  If my nesting/decor philosophy could be defined in three words, they would be style, comfort, and budget. 

Most of the projects that I do around our home are simple and inexpensive like this focal wall that I created in our entrance using happy tape.

The curtains in the living room are painter's canvas that I painted with horizontal stripes and the topiaries on the mantle are foam balls covered with moss.

This is the room where we snuggle in at night to watch movies or read.  Foot stools, pillows, and throws are all within arms reach.  When a pillow begins to wear out its welcome, I simply recover it with a fresh new fabric.  One of the easiest and least expensive ways to perk up a room in my opinion. 

I love to shop in thrift stores and have found many treasures along the  way.  I always look at art and on one outing I found the pair of  watercolors behind the hydrangeas that are a scene from Paris.

Our dining room is another comfy space that opens up onto the deck and recently with cooler temperatures we have enjoyed having the doors and windows open.  A welcome relief in the south.  Another thing that I like to do is combine old and new, rustic and fine.  It's those unexpected combinations that draw me in.  Even though there is a crystal chandelier in this room, you might find an old mason jar filled with flowers, a thrift store chair,  or an urn filled with seashells.  Of course the co-editor had to make an appearance.

With a growing family, we are always looking for storage.  Several years ago we had this bench made that is chocked full of storage and provides ample seating for those sleepovers where pancake breakfasts are served.  The farm table has been in our family for more than 100 years and was made by my great-great grandfather.  The plate wall is a mix of ironstone and spray painted plates found at Goodwill.

I hope you enjoyed a little peek at our cottage and thanks for inviting me over Kat!




Thanks so much Rene! And to see more of her beautiful home and great design ideas, be sure to visit her wonderful blog, Cottage and Vine, by clicking HERE!!!

Jamalamadingdong

The other day I was reading my friend Rene's great blog, Cottage and Vine where she did a post about making fresh strawberry preserves.  My son Bugs has been asking me to make some strawberry jam for the last several years and Rene's post inspired me to get crackin!

My mother always made several types of jam, including Strawberry Freezer Jam, each year, and it was a real treat for my kids whenever they had a sleepover to wake up to toast or english muffins with yummy strawberry jam slathered on top!  It has been a few years since I've made some, but the word on the street was that it was a very good year for strawberries, so I decided it was time to go pick a few!  

Strawberries, peaches, and grapes are just a few of the fruits grown that are often doused with herbicides and insecticides so I only buy organic varieties, which isn't easy in the rural area where I live.  But to my delight, many farmers told me that they didn't need to spray anything on this year's crop of strawberries and that was music to my ears!

I was supposed to go pick strawberries with my sister and niece on the day I hurt my back, so needless to say that didn't happen, but over the weekend I convinced Mr. Tide to take me for a short ride to one of our local Mennonite farms to see if we could find some.  Not only did we find strawberries (9 quarts to be exact) but we also came home with a truckload of flowers too!  So it was a very good day, even if I was made to walk very slowly or stay in the Durango by a certain handsome fellow!

Mr. Tide cut up all of the strawberries that evening and we've been munching on them morning noon and night ever since.  But today I wanted to get going on the jam so that the berries wouldn't over ripen, which makes for bad freezer jam!

If you've never made strawberry freezer jam, or any freezer jam for that matter, you really should, it's so easy and would be a great afternoon activity for you and your children if you still have little ones at home.  All you really need are some berries, a few Tablespoons of lemon juice, LOTS of sugar, some pectin ( I use Certo because it's what my mother and grandmother used), and some clean Ball Canning Jars and lids!

The recipe is even included in the box and it tells you how to make all sorts of jams and jellies...yum!

I like to use fresh lemon juice and I recently brought home that beautiful little glass juicer from my parent's house.  It worked like a champ after all of these years...and I just love the way it looks too!

I also used this lovely turquoise Pyrex bowl that belonged to my mother and my grandmother before her!  See what I mean about using lots of sugar?!  I think this really should be called strawberry hummingbird food, not strawberry freezer jam!

After a bit of berry mushing (done slowly so as not to re-injure my back), and lots of stirring, I now have 10 yummy jam filled jars!  Rene used much cuter labels than I did!  I bought these a few months ago knowing I would eventually be making jam, but her jar labels had a picture of her house on them...too cool!

Tomorrow, if I'm able to drive and Mr. Tide will let me, I plan to deliver a few of these jars filled with sweet strawberry goodness to some friends and neighbors!  Then when it's the dead of winter with not a strawberry in sight, they too can have a cup of tea and a biscuit with jam!