I'm a crafty sort...

...not really. Actually, I never make stuff. Me and hot glue just don't get along.

But I had an idea to make one of those vintage lightbulb/ornament wreaths. Since we use those big colored lights to outline our house, I happened to have a bunch of spare lightbulbs. And today we're snowed in, so it was a good day to do a project.

It took me two years to get my act together and do it though (hey, it took a while to collect all those burned out bulbs!) but it was really easy. And believe me, if I am saying that about a craft, it must be. It only took about an hour and I got to use some of the ornaments I thrifted yesterday (for 75% off!) Which was great, because once I got them home I realized I was going to have to store them for another whole year before putting them up... so win, win!

 And since I had the glue gun out, I also fixed up this bottle brush wreath I have had for years. It needed something, so I added the "Merry Christmas" sign and a few bird ornaments. I had been thinking about bleaching it (as you can see above, our front door is red, and this just wouldn't stand out) but then I decided to hang it in front of my living room mirror.  Perfect! 

A Vintage Christmas

It's been a busy couple of weeks here at Chez QT, so here are a few snapshots of some of my vintage Christmas decorations. (Forgive the dark shots, it was nighttime and my camera is not a good one!)

This is the decoration on the back of my front door. Mercury picks, reflectors, glittered pinecones- all original!

My Christmas blow molds. For some reason I have not been able to find a snowman- yet- but check back next year! The pair of angels I actually bought deadstock from Sines. 

I have a pair of these vintage stockings- aren't they cute?

 I decorate our live tree with only vintage ornaments. 

I love looking at them- I could look at these all day....

These are really huge- that blue one in the lower right is regular size!

I love bubble lights with vintage ornaments!

My aluminum tree- it's only 2 feet tall. I decorate around the bottom with vintage aluminum corsages. The tree topper I just found this year. (See my Pyrex trying to sneak into the picture?)

Some of the ornaments on the aluminum tree. I love these homemade eggshell dioramas. All of these ornaments are vintage miniature size ones.

Some of these balls are really tiny- the one in the center and the one at lower right are only about

 an inch in diameter!

I actually have vintage window candles too- these have red and green bakelite bases with red cardboard tops. 

Hope you had a very vintage Merry Christmas!

It's beginning to look...

...a little like Christmas around here. We've started putting up decorations, and have a few new items this year. I found some really great holiday items over this past year, and while many of them went into my Etsy shop, I saved a couple for us.

Here are some of the newer vintage items around Chez QT:

A pair of bottlebrush trees and a little flocked deer on top of my TV-quarium. I should now say that this is my "prize-winning" TV-quarium, LOL, thanks to the good folks over at No Pattern Required, one of my favorite blogs. Unfortunately, the TV-quarium will have to be moved somewhere else next week, as this is the place we put our Christmas tree.

One of a pair of vintage stockings I'm using as decorations around the entrance to our living room. I make the white pine garland myself every year- over 25 feet. It's very easy; I should do a tutorial one of these days.

I found four of these bakelite and cardboard window candles at an estate sale this summer. I have other red window candles and I needed a couple new ones- these are perfect. They are also nice and heavy so they don't have to be taped to the windowsill. (Don't you hate that? LOL)

I have some new blow molds also- the two angels were 99 cents each at Sine's 5&10. Really. This store still has stock from the 50s and 60s and has never changed the prices over all these years. Instead of putting them up in the living room like last year, I decided to put them all in the downstairs window. I don't know if I like this or not, but we'll see. I do know that I need at least one more, because groupings of odd numbers look better. See how I can rationalize another collection? :) This is why I have more stuff than space.... heehee!

Don't forget to enter my giveaway! Now that we're up to 100 followers, it's official- game on! Get your name in by Friday, and at this point you have a pretty good chance of winning!

It's not easy, being green.

Whew! Sorry folks. It's been a crazy couple of weeks. I knew when I started this blog that it would be hard to keep up with it, and for once I was right. So bear with me; I hope to be able to post more often.

It's probably not real obvious when you meet me, but we're just about as green as we can be. I mean, I'm not a dread-locked hippie wearing hemp clothes (heaven forbid!) and my politics are probably the polar opposite of what you might expect. But I do think it is our responsibility to preserve what we can of our beautiful world.

As kids, my mother got us into recycling and composting back when that was probably considered 'weird'. (We're talking late 1970s.) I have a really hard time throwing away things that could be re-used or recycled. I guess that's part of the reason why I love vintage.

My love for vintage usually fits neatly in with my environmental consciousness. I mean, what's not to love about 70 year-old furniture, clothes, etc? They're not wasting precious new resources, they're better made than new things, and they're not supporting the American drive for conspicuous comsumption.

However, lately I've been having issues with lighting, and the holidays make it all the worse. I'm all for using low-energy types of bulbs when possible- most of our light bulbs around the house are CFLs. But they just don't cast the same warm glow, and I need that in the winter! Plus, if you have many different types of vintage lamps, as we do, they take oddball shapes and sizes. Your standard CFL just won't work in that milk-glass torchiere that needs a wide base bulb. I shudder to think what will happen when standard incandescants are phased out once and for all. Something tells me that you'll be able to spot the true vintage enthusiast by how many incandescants they have stockpiled!

I used to be one of those people that preferred only white lights at the holidays. But lately, I've embraced the old-fashioned C9 colored lights of the past. I just love the looks of them strung along the roofline of our barn. But they get hot as hell. I can't imagine having them on a cut tree indoors- no wonder people always worried about Christmas trees catching fire. And I'm sure that they are the main reason our electric bill is 20% higher in December.

But I won't give them up for anything. I like the idea of LEDs, but I can't stand the looks of them at Christmas. And even though the energy savings would probably be significant, I think there's got to be a plus side for the carbon footprint of my C9s. I mean, they were manufactured 50+ years ago, somewhere in the USA, and aren't using any new petroleum or rubber products, either in manufacturing or transport from halfway around the world. So there- string up your lights and show some incandescant pride! (If you can get them untangled, that is.)