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All Things Home

All Things Home

salt-dough season | traditional salt-dough ornament recipe

One of my favorite holiday projects over all my years of Christmas crafting is making things with salt dough.  It started with an impulsive purchase from an Instagram ad.  I bought two wooden cookie molds, not really even sure what I was going to do with them.  I just thought they were pretty and had good crafting potential.  After languishing in my tin with cookie cutters and piping tips, inspiration hit.  What if I used those pretty molds with humble salt dough?  I hadn’t even thought of salt dough since my elementary years, but it seemed like it might be an idea worth trying.  It’s cheap and easy to make and has the potential to be elevated with beautiful molds.  I made them and they turned out even better than I expected.  Since then, I’ve made several variations, shared my favorite sources for molds, and even made faux “gingerbread houses”

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All Things Home

my favorite realistic faux evergreens

I really loved my Christmas decorating last year, so I will probably do something very similar this year.  It felt classic and beautiful, and looking back over the pictures makes me excited to pull out the bins and deck the halls.  Well, almost.  But, while I’m thinking about it and while you might be planning and shopping, and before everything Christmas is sold out, I wanted to share my favorite realistic faux evergreens for Christmas and winter decorating. Years ago, I purged any artificial greens we had and only used live greenery and trees for several years.  But after a couple of trees dried out and died before Christmas (ugh), and we then moved to a house with forced-air heat (that dried live greens to a crisp), I was forced to revisit them.  While I don’t love storing more Christmas decor in more bins, it is nice to make the

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All Things Home

tucking in the garden for winter

This is our fourth fall in this house, and I think we have finally figured out how to best deal with the leaves from the six large maple trees on our property.  The first fall, we had just moved in and were completely overwhelmed by them.  Our amazing neighbors jumped in and used their two riding mowers to help us out.  Since then, Jeff (primarily) and I have been trying to figure out a system to stay on top of the leaves while also making the most of their benefit to the garden. The first couple of years, we treated them as refuse and took them to the grass and leaf pile at the dump.  As I’ve been reading more about gardening, though, I learned we were throwing away a valuable resource, especially if the leaves are shredded.  Jeff’s dad gave us an old Chipper Vac, so they are even

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All Things Home

Handmade Christmas Garland Round-up

The past few Christmases, since our move back to the East Coast, I have been behind on sharing holiday and Christmas posts.  After years of working way ahead on Christmas for retail, articles, and blog posts, it felt good to decorate, shop for gifts, and share in real time.  I realized, though, that I was often sharing too late for people to make handmade decorations, or that all the products I was using were already sold out!  So, I’m going to share some Christmas decorating and gift ideas earlier this year, not to rush my blog readers along, but to give everyone time to move through the season at a comfortable pace—planning, shopping, and making things at their leisure.  As I’ve been looking through past Christmas ideas, I’ve felt excited about decorating, making things, and relishing the holiday season.  I hope the upcoming posts do the same for you!  I’m

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All Things Home

My Favorite Local Antique Stores

I have been asked several times since I moved back to the mid-Atlantic region if I would share some of my favorite antique stores.  I will start by saying, there are a plethora of fantastic antique stores, markets, co-ops, barn sales, consignment shops, and thrift stores all within about an hour from me.  There is no way I can give an exhaustive list, but I wanted to share the places I regularly check out that are either in Hagerstown or within about half an hour. Beaver Creek Antique Market is my favorite local antique mall.  I used to drive from the Gettysburg area when I lived in PA to shop there every few months.  It has a nice mix of vendors, and I reliably find quality antiques there.  Prices can range from premium to affordable, depending on the vendor and the item, but it’s safe to say there is something

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Art

DIY wet panel carrier for oil paintings

In my previous post about traveling with oil paints, I mentioned I would share a DIY wet panel carrier tutorial, and here it is!  If you don’t use oil paints, you may wonder what a wet panel carrier is and why it’s necessary.  One of the wonderful things about oil paints is that they are slow-drying. This gives you a lot of time to blend and nudge the paint around, or even just scrape it off.  I find it’s even more forgiving than a pencil, which is one of the reasons I love working with oils. The downside of working with a slow-drying medium when traveling is that you now have a wet painting to transport home.  That is why artists who work with oil paints need a wet panel carrier.  I usually use premade wet panel cases from Raymar when I’m painting on the go, and they work great. 

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All Things Home

the great shutter debate

Some people might argue over politics or what kind of music is appropriate for a wedding reception, but what people who love architecture argue about is shutters.  They argue about everything from the proper shutter-to-window ratio to whether hinges and shutter dogs have to be functional.  It’s pretty amusing to see the kind of heated dialogue that can happen in comment sections.  So, let’s talk about it. We recently installed vinyl shutters on our house, selecting a size and scale that matched the existing shutters on other windows and likely the original shutters on this 1970 brick ranch house.  I did this knowing full well that they are not proper shutters.  Most of the shutters on American homes built in the last 50 years aren’t proper shutters.  Most of them are strictly decorative, and they aren’t even trying to pretend that they are functional shutters.  Americans collectively decided somewhere along

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1970 home renovation

how to install vinyl shutters on brick | tutorial

Over the weekend, we installed shutters on the left side of the house.  That was the last side of the house that needed shutters, so I can finally check that project off the list!  This home had wood shutters on all the windows originally, but they had rotted and were removed.  Before we bought the house, vinyl shutters had been installed on the front and right side of the house, but the windows along the back and left sides were left without shutters.  We wanted to bring that architectural element back in, so we ordered, painted, and installed shutters this summer.  You can find a tutorial on how to prime and paint vinyl shutters HERE. In this post, I’m sharing a tutorial showing how to install new shutters on brick. Let me start by saying we built this project up in our minds as one that was going to be

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I’m Marian, a painter, writer, and lover of all things creative. From art and antiques to home projects and everyday life, I share my journey in hopes of inspiring you to embrace your own creativity and make beauty in the spaces you live.

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