Click here for the full story, or go to our “Historic Homes” tab up top and select “Something old, something new.” Thanks, Jim and Latecia!

Since our home doesn’t have a fireplace, I repurposed an old mantel into a bookcase a few years ago and have it displayed in our living area. It’s one of my favorite places in our home to decorate, and I tend to change the decor with each passing season. For my spring vignette I chose light gray and a pale shade of teal as the two colors I wanted to focus on. My inspiration for this color scheme was the neutral book-page wreath hanging on my wall, the flower canvas painting and the metal crate. I bought the painting last year for $39.99 at TJ Maxx, and the teal metal crate is one of my most beloved thrift-store treasures that I scored for $1 several years ago. The wreath was a project I tackled earlier this year, made out of old dictionary paper. It took three hours and lots of hot gluing, but it’s quite the statement piece, and I love how it turned out. I chose smaller neutral pieces to fill in the space around these three focal points. I wanted to keep the theme light and airy for spring, and teal is the perfect color for this.

Here’s a list of sources and pricing for the things listed, from left to right.

Vintage glass bottles, $1 each, from Vain and Vintage on Center Street here in Pocatello

Vintage book with teal cover, $1, thrifted

Glass lamp, $10, TJ Maxx

Small gray pitcher, $1, thrifted Pottery Barn item

Metal crate, $1, thrifted

Rolled book pages inside crate from a vintage dictionary, thrifted for $3

Ceramic bunnies, $6.99 each, TJ Maxx

Canvas painting, $39, TJ Maxx

Ceramic bowl with handles, $2, thrifted

Beaded birdies, $7.99 for three, TJ Maxx

Vintage Ball canning jar, $1.50, thrifted

Small white pitcher, $1.50, thrifted

Vintage books, $1 each, thrifted

Black birdies, $3 for the pair, a local estate sale

Small teal pitcher, $2.99, TJ Maxx

Spring! The time of year when grass turns green and flowerbeds present us with fresh bursts of color. For this mantel vignette I chose bright, bold oranges and grassy greens to pair with neutrals of white and black. Pastel colors are most often used to represent spring, but after these last dreary days of winter, I feel splashy colors are a fun and uplifting alternative.

To create this display I gathered a group of chickens from the thrift store that I spray painted white sometime last year.  Baby chicks are a sure sign of spring, and these little ones have a simple, modern look.  I pulled in an interesting shaped plant from my kitchen and picked up some fluffy orange flowers and green moss mat from the craft store.  All of the vases and pots have been picked up at thrift stores, and some were revived with a few coats of white paint. Puppies also shout “spring” to me, and when this little guy peeked out from the shelves of art at Ross, I couldn’t resist.  The colors work well with the poppy painting I already owned, and some books that I pulled in to balance the display.  The little dachshund bookends were a weekend flea-market score.

There you have it: a modern, colorful arrangement that is guaranteed to make you smile.

Rebecca Hermance, Master of Arts in Interior Design

Uniquely You Interiors

rebecca.hermance@gmail.com

509-999-9063

uniquelyyouinteriors.com

For my mantel I wanted to try something a little out of my norm. Usually I prefer a pared-down look, but it’s spring, and it’s worth celebrating. So I went for a kind of collected, crazy-naturalist look with feathers, plants and a real-life bird’s nest.

Yeah, I surprised myself with the bird’s nest. I’ve been tempted to display one before but been scared off by the germs. But my mother-in-law found this one blown from her tree after a late-winter storm, and I’m hoping either the frost or being sealed in a plastic bag for a week killed off whatever buggers were lingering. Either way, I doused it in Lysol when I placed it on the mantel and washed my hands three times after handling it. My boys love having a real nest in our house.

The two P’s on the right are a nod to my last name (Pyper), and the feathers were dropped by a hawk who roosts near our home in the summer — they’ve probably got lots of germs too, but we just keep washing our hands.

Up tomorrow: Another springtime mantel! See you soon.

All images via Olioboard

I just heard about Olioboard this week and wanted to give it a try. If you’re like me, you’ve seen cool moodboards all over the blogosphere (I love this one and this one). The cool thing about Oliobard is that you can create your own moodboard from thousands of products; just click on the photos you like and drag them onto your canvas.  Trust me — it’s a lot faster than building your own moodboard in Photoshop.

And if you especially love something you find, like a great orange chair, the product information/purchase price appears when you click on the image, along with a link to the site where you can order it. It’s like shopping for your home made TONS faster than surfing the Web.

Did I mention Olioboard is free?

Here’s a moodboard I put together this morning, and if you make one and post it on your blog, send me a link — I’d love to see it.

It occurred to me that I could commission a painting, but I don’t have a ton of cash to spend on art. But I like the idea of supporting budding artists, and as a former schoolteacher, I love school-aged kids. So I talked to the local art teacher and asked if he had a student who could paint me a big picture of poppies.

He did. I’ve been working with this young artist, a senior in high school, for a while now, and I’m excited about the prospects. I sent her a few samples of paintings I like (like this and this), as well as a possible palette. I also want lots of texture. She worked up a few samples for me, and I talked to her about what I like and don’t like. Next time we chat she’ll have a small version of what might become the final product, and I’m excited to see it.

I’ll post on the details like cost, time and hiccups along the way.

Despite all appearances, At Home is still here! We took a brief hiatus, but we’ll be publishing again next month. We’ve got some good stuff planned, like a great historic-home feature about embracing the integrity of older homes, so stay tuned.

Later this week I’ll have a post on getting custom artwork (read: original paintings) for less — and from an unexpected source. I’m commissioning a painting for my home, and I’ll be sharing all the steps with you.

P.S. A few days ago I realized I hadn’t gotten out any red and pink junk yet. And since February is the only time of year I decorate with these colors (and because I’ve got kids who love holiday decor), I threw together this “clothesline” picture frame for pinning a few love-y things — and for hiding my thermostat. My mom made the “L-O-V-E” chipboard letters at the bottom, and the playbill is from a show my husband took me to see in San Fran last year. And those old, wood clothespins? I picked up a bag of them for $1 at Hidden Treasures in Shelley two weeks ago.

By Hollie Keller for At Home

I found this brass candlestick while rummaging through the shelves at D.I. a few months ago. I searched high and low for its mate, to make it a pair, but no such luck. Still, I love how it adds a touch of winter to any shelf I put it on. At just $0.75 it was quite a steal!

See Hollie’s other treasures — for sale! — at Vintage Farm Furniture.  

Today we’re taking a break from Thrifty Thursday, but this post is kind of thrifty anyway. I bought these beautiful vintage ornaments at an estate sale this fall for $3.25. I felt guilty paying so little for 70 ornaments (and a glass tree topper) that had obviously been carefully wrapped and stored year after year, but I am happy to be giving them a new home. 

Anyway, this column is from Scott Phillips, who we featured here and here. He offers a little background into the world of ornaments and what to know if you want to start a collection of your own. Thanks, Scott!

***

The earliest known secular historical text referencing the date of Jesus’s birth is a Roman calendar dating from the year 336 A.D.  This pre-Julian calendar was published during the final two years of the reign of Emperor Constantine the Great, who embraced Christianity and encouraged its practice in the empire.  But the celebration of Christmas as we understand it, complete with a decorated tree, didn’t arrive for another 1,200 years.

In the 8th century legend holds that St. Boniface introduced the “Christmas” tree to the Germanic people as a device to remember the Holy Trinity by the tree’s three triangular points.

By 1510 in the Baltic area of northern Europe, historical texts suggest fir trees were being decorated with roses to commemorate the Virgin Mary.  This is the first documented emergence of a decorated Christmas tree.

Origins of Christmas ornaments

Prior to the production of glass ornaments trees had been decorated with candles, flowers, pinecones and edible produce like fruit.  However, religious repression, economic hardship and the collapse of the main-stay industry in a German town, and a royal wedding, would ultimately lead to a world-wide proliferation of glass Christmas ornaments.

Glassmaking began in Lauscha, Germany, in the 1590s with the arrival of Protestant glassmakers, who fled their Bavarian homes due to religious persecution.  Initially the town’s glass factories produced drinking glasses and bullseye window glass, but production soon shifted to glass beads.  However, by 1845, Bohemia surpassed Lauscha as a producer of superior beads, and Lauscha’s bead market evaporated.  Interestingly a historical ledger from a Lauscha glass blower lists the production of six dozen Christmas tree ornaments in 1848.  By 1857 Louis Greiner-Schlotfeger earned fame for perfecting the production of modern silvered-glass Christmas balls.

After the marriage of the German royal Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Queen Victoria of England in 1840, the Christmas tradition of decorated trees became immensely popular in Great Britain and spread to other parts of Europe.  German entrepreneurs capitalized on this growing market by scaling up ornament production.  Soon Lauscha became the worldwide epicenter for the manufacture of glass Christmas ornaments, and waves of immigrants leaving Europe for the Americas would make decorating Christmas trees a western, if not global, tradition.

Mass-market ornaments

In the early 1900s the Soviet Union was even earning a reputation for producing quality ornaments, but the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 ended the Russian ornament industry.

Prior to 1925 about 95 percent of all glass ornaments were manufactured in Lauscha, with nearly a quarter-billion ornaments being imported into the United States annually by 1935.  With the advent of World War II and the rise of the Eastern Bloc with the town of Lauscha lying behind the Iron Curtain, the production of glass ornaments in Germany declined dramatically. Just prior to the war other nations, including Japan and Czechoslovakia, began producing ornaments for the American market.

Domestically, again prior to the war, the Corning Company of New York began producing blown-glass Christmas ornaments, many of which were sold through Woolworth five-and-dime stores. F.W. Woolworth was skeptical of his new product line, at least until his annual sales of Christmas ornaments quickly rose to $25 million!

Material shortages after 1939 and the start of WWII led the Corning Company to abandon an earlier practice of silvering the entire inside of glass ornaments and instead decorate the ornaments with thin stripes of pastel colors, which saved great quantities of metallic-oxide pigments for the war effort.

By the 1960s the miracle metal of aluminum was fashionable, and in the name of progress, many of the old and outdated Christmas ornaments of years past were thrown away and replaced by ornaments that looked better on the new all-aluminum Christmas trees that graced many modern families’ homes.

Distinguishing old from new

In general terms earlier glass ornaments were smaller than the ornaments sold today and were usually finished in softer colors with hand-painted details.  Most likely, they’ll be faded, and their paint may be distressed and chipped.

Clay and wood molds, and later metal molds, were employed in the production of hand-blown glass ornaments around 1870.  The first ornament mold employed was believed to have been a tree-shaped wooden cookie mold.  Between 1870 and 1939 more than 5,000 different molded ornament designs were produced in Lauscha.  Like auto companies of today, glass ornament manufacturers introduced new designs, patterns and colors each year to stimulate demand for their ornaments.

You can differentiate hand-blown from machine-made glass ornaments by removing the stem from the base of the ornament.  Molded hand-blown ornaments will feature an uneven or jagged base where the ornament was broken free from the glass pipe upon which it was blown.  Machine-made ornaments will have a smooth base.  On older ornaments, company names or even country names will often be imprinted on the ornament’s stem.  Hand-blown ornaments made before the advent of molds will usually be heftier and made of thicker glass.

Glass wasn’t the only material used to craft antique and vintage Christmas ornaments.  Some of the most highly collectible pre-WWII ornaments were made from embossed cardboard in Dresden, Germany. Some of these cardboard ornaments were painted gold or silver and, because of their superior detailing, actually look like stamped metal.  Very early German ornaments were handmade of lead in people’s homes. In fact, early ornament production became a cottage industry that employed entire households.  A family could often produce and paint up to 600 ornaments a week.

Christmas-ornament market

Collector groups, like the Golden Glow of Christmas Past (www.goldenglow.org), a national organization for ornament collectors, contend the market for antique ornaments is strong.  Old glass ornaments can fetch as much as $600 each, but the price is ultimately determined by age, color, condition and manufacturer.

Collecting ornaments can be an enjoyable hobby, as the cost to begin is fairly low and the compact size of the ornaments means a substantial collection can be stored easily in a small space.  Antique and vintage Christmas ornament can be found everywhere from yard sales to thrift stores to antique stores, in prices ranging from a few nickels to a few dollars.

Finders Keepers, an antique store located at 120 N. 2^nd Avenue, in Old Town Pocatello, boasts a year-round gingerbread house inside of the store that’s stocked with Christmas trimmings and collectible ornaments. Scott also sells his one-of-a-kind creations there. Check it out!

By Hollie Keller for At Home

When I came across these boots a few weeks ago, I thought to myself, Hold the phone! Real vintage leather cowgirl boots in my size for $5? It must be a dream! I tried those puppies on, and they fit perfectly. And not only do they fit well, they also work great for autumn décor. Score!

Tip: Want to use your own pair of tall boots as decor? Save a few sparkling-cider bottles (empty or full) and place them inside each boot. It helps them stay standing nice and tall instead of falling to the side.

See Hollie’s other finds at Vintage Farm Furniture.