More of my favorites...

This is my all time favorite Christmas decoration. It was my Momo's and she gave it to me this year at Christmas time. I used to always get in trouble for playing with it and I am glad that she kept me from breaking it. It's kind of tacky, but it tap dances to "up on the housetop." It will forever remind me of Christmas at Momo and Papa's. I chose to display it in my DVD case year round...I love it so much I am afraid to put it away somewhere where it could potentially get crushed. It would be one of the few things I grab if there were a fire in my house...it is located near my wedding photos for a reason.

These are three new trays that I purchased...I am trying to add this bright Italian blue to my tuscan kitchen for a pop of color, not that my kitchen lacks color...the walls are terra cotta and the ceiling is a pale golden sunlight yellow. I love it. It is warm and inviting and takes the focus off my nasty flooring. My future mud room is going to be an apple green with this blue as accents as well to tie it all together. My best friends family is from Sicily, some family members still live their. They make Italian (sorry, Sicilian) pottery...I am trying to get them to import me some.

Kevin made me this for our first Christmas. He used to work at a machine shop and spent over 15 hours cutting it out. It is super delicate for being stainless and my cats love to swat at it when it is on display, so it is wrapped in tissue paper and in my hope chest. It comes out at christmas time.

You can see my kitchen wall color here, even though the flash made it more pink than it is in person.

This is a really cool platter that I got for a wedding present. I have matching cloth napkins that go with it and wine glasses with the same etched ginko leaf pattern. I want to tie it into my dining room but am struggling to figure out how. My dining room is going to be quite formal. Tin ceilings, cream wainscotting with inset panels to just above chair rail and then the upper portion of the walls is going to be flat black with a glossy black damask pattern around the top and dispersed randomly through out the black portion. I want to do a bright color accent, but am leaning towards either yellow, robins egg blue, or a bright vibrant green. This teal just won't pop enough, but I love the pattern...what to do, what to do...

I started collecting luncheon sets from the 50's when I was 16. I have about 20 place settings now in this pattern and one other pattern. I thought they were cute. Turns out my aunt has been collecting this same pattern since she got married back in 1959 when she got a set as a wedding present. She told me that she is going to pass them on to me when she gets too old to use them. We currently use them at all Steinbauer bridal and baby showers. They bring a sophistication all their own to the parties. We try to be all upper class when we can...we are good at pretending that we aren't a bunch of farmers when it's just us ladies...