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Scenes from Christmas

December 27, 2015 by Ashley Hackshaw

We spent a few days in Charlotte for Christmas where my sister and brother live with their families. It’s the 2nd Christmas now we’ve been able to spend with my family since moving back to the east coast. I love this photo of Boo, my mother, and Max on Christmas Eve. It’s one of the only photos we got because my little niece Leighton had a really high fever on Christmas Eve and we were focused on making her comfortable.

Boo and my niece Leighton the first night we arrived. We could tell she felt a little under the weather because she wasn’t very chatty:

Boo set out a snack for the reindeer and Santa all by herself on Christmas Eve:

The next morning we woke up super early and Santa had come! Boo is known for getting emotional over certain gifts each year but I can never predict which one. She got the books and stuffed animals she asked for and there wasn’t much of a reaction but then she opened this shirt I brought back from Nashville…tears. American Pickers is her favorite show….she couldn’t believe I actually went to the store.

Another highlight was the new kitchen my niece got for Christmas. It’s nicer than my real kitchen! She kept trying to crawl under the sink and kept saying “bye!” So cute.

Christmas day was a fun day with brother’s family. My brother Swen and his wife Karen cooked us an amazing feast:

This ended up being one of my favorite photos….my two nephews and Sienna. The littlest one photo bombed the other two with a stink bomb in this one:

My sister Perry’s birthday is in December so we always celebrate her as well:

I made this sign and then my mother made me add “and Jesus” to the bottom. I knew she’d do that!

Oh and it rained and rained and rained the whole time. My brother-in-law Justin took us out on the golf cart a few times to check the water levels of the creeks on the golf course. My dad used to do that every time it flooded too:

It rained so much that we started noticing that my sister’s garage ceiling was sagging a little from the dampness. It must have gotten soaked because my sister called me just an hour after we left and said, “you won’t believe what just happened….the garage ceiling collapsed!” We had all walked under that roof a dozen times over the weekend:

We were so lucky it fell when no one was in there when it happened! I do wish we had been there to help them clean up the mess.

Now we are back home with more memories to add to our banks. Hope everyone had a safe holiday!

Vintage Hiking and Rustic Trail Sign Ornaments

December 21, 2015 by Ashley Hackshaw

Click here to find all the ornaments and tutorials from this year’s tree! Thanks for following along this year!

How to make vintage hiking and rustic trail sign ornaments. This is the final post of the vintage hiking and camping ornament series this year. These easy DIY rustic trail signs and vintage-inspired hiking signs are so easy to make you could whip up dozens of them in time for Christmas still. All of these little sign ornaments were made from pre-cut pieces of wood found at Michaels. The rustic trail sign wood came in packs of six. First I painted these with a gray acrylic paint:

When the gray paint was dry I brushed on a diluted wash of brown acrylic paint to create the aging effect:

The letters were traced onto the wood using regular letter stencils and then carefully painted white:

For the vintage hiking signs I used these small pre-cut wood sign pieces also from Michaels:

I painted the brown base coat first and then used an image of an actual vintage sign to trace my image onto the wood. I kept the image and the chalk tracing paper in place using a rubber band to trace:

Using a small paintbrush I filled in the image. A damp cloth wipes away any of the tracing.

The image and tracing paper can be reused over and over again. These were so easy to make I just kept cranking them out:

The Appalachian Trail signs were made the exact same way just using different colors:

I love how all the signs look together:

And how they looked on the finished tree!

Outdoorsy with the skewers of marshmallows:

Click here to find all the ornaments and tutorials from this years tree! Thanks for following along this year!

Vintage Inspired Signs and Vintage Decor

December 16, 2015 by Ashley Hackshaw

I finally got the “Just Thru Town” sign hung over the doorway to the living room. I took this photo before church on Sunday and I love that it caught Brett pushing Boo outside on the tree swing:

I found the globe in the background last year at a thrift store. It’s big and metal and just needed a few tweaks. I moved the magnetic poetry from the refrigerator to the globe!

I can tell which poetry is Boo’s because all of her word groups are below the equator:

The circus sign in progress a few days ago:

I hung it in the kitchen above the Coca-Cola sign I made a few years back:

The weather vane used to be on the roof of my great-grandfather’s barn (the barn he built) in Kansas in the early 1900’s. The “Vacation Center” sign I bought at a yard sale for $2. And the antique phone? It used to hang in my childhood home. I remember my dad always hitting his head on the mouthpiece if he wasn’t paying attention.

Brett says my decorating style is: hang anything and everything on the wall. I can’t argue with that.