Welcome to this week’s Share Your Style #410, dear friends! Sorry this is getting up so late. It’s been getting harder to get SYS out lately with late fall weather coming on, getting the garden prepped to sleep, work and the holidays and family visiting. I planned to take last week off but the previous week I was busy with work.
But we’re back and ready for a little Thanksgiving finale and a welcome to the Christmas holiday season! Let’s get to this week’s wonderful features, shall we? Oh! And a new opening party photo for the season… 🙂
I am Barbara Chapman and I’d love it if you’d follow me here on my blog and on any of my other social media sites, too. Thank you!💜
Just as cute as can be, these fun Reindeer Hot Chocolate Cone Bags from Lois at Walking On Sunshine Recipes really hit the dessert spot! Yum!!!
Dave and Jaime from Photo Jeepers are back with this fun idea for gift giving for the camping enthusiast in your life ~ National Park Ornaments Are Festive Vacation Keepsakes. They sure are! Great stocking stuffer idea!!!
Looking for some DIY project ideas? Look no further than this DIY Black French Provincial Dresser post by Natalie and Taylor from A Ray of Sunlight. Love this dresser’s new look!
Oh my goodness!!! I don’t know about you but I am wishing I’d seen this turkey sooner… Adorable and gorgeous!!! Sarah from Hyacinths for the Soul shared a Tribute to Tom Turkey and this gorgeous bird was part of the story. Neat story about the creator of this beaded bird! Do check her post out. <3
Penny from Penny’s Treasures brings us a treasure this week with a story called a Christmas Open House on Meadow View Lane. Adorable scenes you will surely love!!!
I love all the holiday inspiration this week and Debra from Common Ground shares her Thanksgiving spirit in this post ~ Giving Thanks in the Holiday Cupboard. More beautiful turkeys and enchanting fall china patterns… Be still our hearts! <3
DeeDee from Clover House brings us her beautiful Christmas decor in this post ~ The Majestic 7′ King Noble Fir: A Regal Unlit Christmas Tree. I have to say I do love King of Christmas decor and bought one of their wreaths when we bought this house four years ago. Great sale going on so do swing by DeeDee’s blog.
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Thank You so much to everyone who linked up this past week. A special thank you to everyone for always promoting Share Your Style on your blog and on your social media channels! I do see it when I stop by and I appreciate the love. 💜
If you’d like to follow my Share Your Style board on Pinterest I’d appreciate it, thank you! I do post all of the featured posts from each week’s SYS there plus usually other photos from those posts to my boards.💜 Thanks so much!!! If you are new to French Ethereal, I hope you will think about subscribing to my blog.
Happy almost December, friends, and welcome to this month’s Pinterest Challenge hosted by my friend Cindy of County Road 407 fame. This month we are creating beautiful evening holiday tables and… Mine just happened to work out with mostly whites and golds…
If you are just coming over from Niky at The House on Silverado for the first time, welcome! I am soooo glad you are here. 🙂 Enjoy the tour today and please think about subscribing if you enjoy my site, thank you. 💜
Her table looks lovely in her post with its gilded candelabras, candlesticks and all the baubles set on the table. Her gold inspired me to pull out my silver for this challenge as I don’t have as many gilded candlesticks. 🙂
Kelley created the prettiest gilded table here with lots of textured sparkly ornaments, twig faux bois taper candlesticks and other gold candlesticks perfect for pillar candles. Love the Christmas tree in the background!
I love how the tree is an extension of the gilding found on the table! Isn’t candlelight just so beautiful at night?
I love the neutral look, too, and that is more of the inspiration I took out of today’s challenge and where I jumped-off in my table’s vignette.
I have a number of gold and silver candelabras and candlesticks so I went for the mercury glass silver big taper candleholders as my anchoring pieces. I knew I wanted to have white as my base as I was pulling out my woodland themed animals.
From there, I added in my hand-decorated mini Christmas trees plus a few others I found decorated with little red berries, snow and a couple of glass Christmas trees thrown in the mix, too.
Like Kelley had in the background of the inspiration tablescape, I hung a Christmas wreath on the kitchen door going out into the backyard. For fun, I thought I’d wrap the two rose botanical prints this year as presents. Kinda fun!! 🙂
Adding some of our sparkly animal ornaments from our collection to my winter wonderland scene were the final touch on this nighttime holiday tablescape.
Okay, and two white linen napkins underneath it all for the “snow,” as I alluded to before. 😉
Thanks for stopping by today! I appreciate your sharing a photo or two, if you would. Lastly, please enjoy visiting Michelle from Thistle Key Lane who is up next and whose table is just lovely with holiday ornaments and fresh greenery!!!
Happy weekend, everyone! Over the past couple of weekends, my husband, aka Mr. Ethereal, has been noodling how to make a mini greenhouse for me to protect our summer and winter veggies growing out in the south garden. Winter is coming soon and I hope to grow some vegetables into the wintertime…
This year I have finally had a bumper crop of tomatoes! The roses grew well as did these guys with the super high temps, so I with the milder fall weather, I am hoping to get these little cherry and Big Boy tomatoes to ripen before winter really sets in around North Texas.
***On a side note, sorry about no SYS this week! I had a dentist appointment on Wednesday afternoon late after work, and by the time I was done, I was beat. I’m back painting in the early mornings before school, getting the powder room done while Hubby is gone on a business trip.
Room for more planters!
How to make your own mini greenhouse
Mr. Ethereal started with putting four rebar rods into the four corners surrounding an area about 8′ square near our little shed which houses the lawn mower and all of the “stinky” equipment. 🙂
Next, he picked up four 10′, 1/2″ PVC plastic pipes from the big box store. He had to figure out long the curves needed to be. He cut each pipe down to 8′, I believe, and used a 1/2″ connector in the middle of each arch to connect each section. He plans on getting two more pipes to add a third arch in the middle soon.
From there, Mr. E draped heavy plastic over the top weighted down with 4’x4′ posts holding down the extra plastic.
Lastly, we gathered the Harbor Freight clips, used with netting over the citrus trees this spring (2/$1.00 on sale), to secure the plastic to the bent pole arches.
He plans of adding more plastic at the back and a slip overlapped piece for the front for a “door.”
I totally love this improvised mini greenhouse!!! Right now, there is room to house the garden cart, which is awesome. 🙂
The southern fence here helps protect all the plantings set there. I hope to create a microclimate underneath this little greenhouse where we can grow more plants to sustain us throughout the year. Kale grows well in winter as does broccoli and cauliflower. Carrots and potatoes can be planted in late winter, and garlic needs to sit throughout the cold winter months to help them set. That’s something I need to still get from the local hardware/farm store!
The wild tomatoes in July.
Peppers and tomatoes do well in the spring, summer and here into the fall. I have baby asparagus growing, too! Asparagus takes three years to mature, so its a long haul with them. 🙂 The asparagus growing in the back planter here above was older to begin with.
The other asparagus I have in another round planter will be three years old next year. I need to pick up one more oval planter and
Planters instead of inground
I love in-ground planters and had two at our last home in California. Here, though, we have nasty fire ants! Those mean little buggers bite me all of the time so to help prevent getting bit and then having to eradicate them while growing veg (possibly making ourselves sick), I thought raised beds would help. So far, so good! They have stayed out of the planters.
Each planter is raised on bricks and I drilled holes in the bottoms of each planter for drainage. I didn’t do that the first year but fixed that last year which has made a big difference in the health of all of the plants growing in each metal planter. 🙂
And that’s our little greenhouse! Mr. Ethereal is thinking of making a little two shelf bench for me to keep terra cotta pots on here to the left built out of scrap lumber. But that’s another project… 😉
Hello, everyone! Welcome to this week’s Share Your Style #409!! Fall has finally come to North Texas and everyone is loving the change in weather. So nice! Since we have cooler weather, I’ve been out in the garden pulling weeds, cutting back rose bushes (just a little), and clearing out dead plants and prepping for late fall/early winter planters. I am very grateful for these cooler temps!
Let’s find out what features everyone shared two weeks ago… 🙂
I am Barbara Chapman and I’d love it if you’d follow me here on my blog and on any of my other social media sites, too. Thank you!💜
Debbie from Debbie-Dabble Blog shared her hubby’s trip out ~ Joe’s Trip to Pittsburgh & the Flight 93 Memorial Site. A fun trip to a hockey game, and a more somber visit to Flight 93’s final resting place. We give thanks for the people aboard Flight 93 who fought back against terrorists that day.
Oh my goodness! Lois from Walking on Sunshine brings us her Pumpkin Coffee Cake recipe and man! it looks so delicious!!! Can’t wait to try it!
Kathryn over at The Dedicated House shared this lovely autumn post ~ Fall Fireplace Mantel. So pretty!!
Our final feature for this week is from Sarah from Must Have Mom. She shares this DIY post ~ Fall Dollar Tree Cricut Projects. Great ideas!!!
Thank You so much to everyone who linked up this past week. A special thank you to everyone for always promoting Share Your Style on your blog and on your social media channels! I do see it when I stop by and I appreciate the love. 💜
If you’d like to follow my Share Your Style board on Pinterest I’d appreciate it, thank you! I do post all of the featured posts from each week’s SYS there plus usually other photos from those posts to my boards.💜 Thanks so much!!! If you are new to French Ethereal, I hope you will think about subscribing to my blog.
Happy All Saints Day, dear friends!!! Halloween was yesterday, of course, but I was inspired by you to bake these adorable Halloween Jalapeño Poppers to take to work for our staff treats share day. 😉
At last week’s Share Your Style, I featured newcomer Sarah from Must Have Mom with this popping good post. So adorable!!!
I have to tell you, these jalapeño poppers are delicious!!! Taking the seeds out of the first few… Whew, not so much!
My eyes were watering, I was coughing (head turned away to keep the jalapeños clean), I had to stop and blow my nose…
But so worth it!!!
How to make Halloween Jalapeño Poppers
Ingredients you will need:
12-20 jalapeño peppers, sliced open horizontally and seeded. Leave the stems on for holding while filling (and for cuteness!).
Do wear gloves for cutting and filling each pepper! This was recommended by Sarah and I fully agree. I have heard that you can buy cut and pre-seeded jalapeños but I haven’t tried to find them this way. This may be an option for you. 🙂
1 package 8 oz. Neufchatel cheese
8 oz. shredded pepperjack cheese (I used a brick and shredded/cut up myself)
1-2 green onions, chopped
1 refrigerated can of crescent rolls
1 egg, separated; use the egg white to brush on the filled and wrapped peppers (for browning the crescent roll strips)
candy eyes for your Halloween popper people
Mixing together 50% Neufchatel cheese (8 oz. package) and 50% pepperjack cheeses, with 1-2 green onions chopped up. If you have a food processor or standing mixer, this really helps combine the filling mixture.
Fill each pepper and place onto a prepared cookie sheet.
Separate the crescent rolls into rectangles, pinching the triangles together to create rectangles.
Use a pizza cutter to slice each rectangle into strips.
Wrap up each filled pepper popper. If you leave the crescent roll strips out for a bit, the dough softens which makes it easier to wrap your pepper people. 🙂
Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. Check for softness.
Place on candy eyes right after removing the pepper poppers from the oven. Each Halloween Pepper Popper has its own personality!
I am so glad that I made these! The tray was completely cleaned up early in the day at school, nary a crumb left.
A big thank you to Sarah at Must Have Mom for sharing her recipe! This has been fun to recreate for you. <3
Welcome back to another Share Your Style and this number is SYS #408! We had a great selection of posts to look at and narrowing down the features to just a few is sooo challenging… Let’s enjoy those features together, shall we?
I am Barbara Chapman and I’d love it if you’d follow me here on my blog and on any of my other social media sites, too. Thank you!💜
It’s our Red Ribbon Week at school this week, which happens to coincide with our Book Fair, so this has been another busy week! At this fall’s fair, I found a pumpkin recipe cookbook for myself, and coincidentally, this all coincides with this month’s Recipe Pinterest Challenge. Yummmmmm!!!
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Here’s what I shared this past week atFrench Ethereal…
My entry for this month’s Recipe Pinterest Challenge is An Autumn Cranberry-Apple Crumble. There are soooo many good recipes to try! Do stop by, won’t you?
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And here are this week’s featured posts…
It is still so warm apart much of the world here late in October that it’s fun to share this summery outfit from Jennifer at Curated by Jennifer ~ Linen Crop Top and Navy Skirt. Cute!!!
We are only a few days away from Halloween and just a month from Thanksgiving so I am happy to share this cute craft idea with you from newcomer Ann at Ann’s Entitled Life. Ann delights us with this Pilgrim Gnome DIY – Thanksgiving Crafts Decorations. Welcome!!!
Thank You so much to everyone who linked up this past week. A special thank you to everyone for always promoting Share Your Style on your blog and on your social media channels! I do see it when I stop by and I appreciate the love. 💜
If you’d like to follow my Share Your Style board on Pinterest I’d appreciate it, thank you! I do post all of the featured posts from each week’s SYS there plus usually other photos from those posts to my boards.💜 Thanks so much!!! If you are new to French Ethereal, I hope you will think about subscribing to my blog.
Welcome to this month’s Pinterest Challenge, dear friends! Our friend Cindy from County Road 407 came up with a yummy idea to share with y’all here in October (absolutely perfect for taking to all those upcoming holiday parties and for fall BBQ’s), and that is to create a simple recipe for you! I’ve come up with a Cranberry-Apple Crumble, which can be made any time of the the year, but is my new go-to here as we move into the holiday season…
If you are just stopping by from Diane from South House Designs for the first time, welcome! I am so happy you are here!! 🙂 Isn’t Diane’s Butter Cake recipe just delicious looking?? I’ve been drooling ever since… ;)’
Here’s what you need to make this recipe:
whole berry cranberries in sauce, 1 can
one or two apples for sweetness, chopped (I left the skin on) – these are Pink Ladies
make a crisp topping, of which I had some frozen in the freezer. I made more to round out the recipe. 🙂
chopped pecans – about 1/2 cup or so
flour
butter to melt into recipe and butter to butter your 8″ x 8″ pan
brown sugar
1 egg
add oats if you like! I do!!
This variation is my own recipe with cranberries and apples. The recipe above was my starting point. I used the whole cranberry in place of the raspberry preserves; however, both would be equally good in this crumble. 🙂
Butter your dish, of course. I decided to use real butter this time instead of spray butter. It really does add that extra flavor!
Oops! 😉 I opened regular cranberry sauce first. This was take two!
Chop up your pecans and apple and add into a small mixing bowl with the whole berry cranberry sauce.
Mix up the crumble and add oats if you like to have them in your recipes. Melt the butter and add into the crumble mixture. Press about half of the mix into the bottom of the pan.
Pour in the cranberry mixture and spread out over all of the oat-sugar-flour mixture.
Then pour or spoon the rest of the crumble over the cranberry-apple spread. Bake at 350 degrees F. for 42 minutes.
Enjoy!!!
This was an easy recipe to make and goes together quickly. This is actually the first time I used whole berry cranberry sauce to make a recipe but it worked great in place of the preserves. I’d definitely make this again as I personally love cranberries!
Renae from Peacock Ridge Farm is up next and I know you’ll love the autumn-inspired charcuterie board she has created for you! Thanks for stopping by, consider subscribing and do enjoy visiting all of the ladies on today’s recipe tour. It’s a yum day!!!
Welcome, friends, to this week’s Share Your Style #407! Thank you to all of you who linked up last week as we had over 100 posts shared. Really amazing, thank you!!
Let’s check out this week’s features…
I am Barbara Chapman and I’d love it if you’d follow me here on my blog and on any of my other social media sites, too. Thank you!💜
Next we have Sandra from Come to Dinner at Eight‘s totally adorable table set with these cute ghosties!!! ~ A Hauntingly Delightful Halloween! Fun!!!
We need something to eat with our fun tablesettings, let’s try some Chicken and Waffle Sliders by Estelle at Homemade on a Weeknight. Yum!!!
Niky from The House on Silverado brings out the spooky in her DIY How to Make Cheesecloth Ghosts for Halloween. My mother used to make mini cheesecloth ghost back in the early 1970’s and she used Hawaiian bark cloth, too, for ghosts! Great refresh of this older craft! Love it!!!
That’s all I have time to add for right now, dear friends! I’ve got to get off to work. Sorry I fell asleep last evening before posting… Part of the woes of still working, lol! 🙂
I may get some more features added later this afternoon when I get home, but if not, this will have to do. 🙂 Check back later to see if your post has been added… <3
Thank You so much to everyone who linked up this past week. A special thank you to everyone for always promoting Share Your Style on your blog and on your social media channels! I do see it when I stop by and I appreciate the love. 💜
If you’d like to follow my Share Your Style board on Pinterest I’d appreciate it, thank you! I do post all of the featured posts from each week’s SYS there plus usually other photos from those posts to my boards.💜 Thanks so much!!! If you are new to French Ethereal, I hope you will think about subscribing to my blog.
We are taking a trip back to France today! Let’s go visit a thrift shop over in Grenoble, France, which I was able to walk to from our AirBnB in July 2022…
The day of my niece and new nephew’s wedding, we had the morning to ourselves. It was a sunny Saturday and Amy decided she wanted to relax in the BnB after breakfast. I decided to see if I could find an antiques shop or a thrift shop and I did!
La Remise was the thrift store I found after a couple of hours walking around the city. 🙂
I used Maps on my phone to get around the city and just started following streets while going for a walk, and looking for a fun place or two to shop!
I found beautiful gardens and these sweet lamb’s ear plants tucked into this enclosed rock seat.
Right beside this wildflower meadow area was a pathway and that is what I hiked down and where I eventually found La Remise.
Looks like Abbey Road, huh? 😉
Isn’t this view magnificent?
Grenoble is a major ski town in the winter and even hosted the Winter Olympics in 1968. It was a warm day this day but had cooled considerably from two days before when we first arrived. Such a beautiful city!
Let’s head to the thrift shop…
La Remise had a lot of china and glassware inside, plus there was a second side-store front to the right of this main entrance. I took a look in there, too.
Of all of the things I hoped to find, a fence piece just wasn’t anywhere I was looking. Here I was just trying to be respectful of the other people shopping so I only took a couple of photographs. Surprisingly, there were a lot of things from the USA in there (little signs and teacups I recognized were sold in the United States).
I did find this sweet little watercolor painting and it packed well in my suitcase. Probably a bit easier than a big fence would, lol! 😉
A nice thrift shop which supports two local Catholic and Presbyterian charities, and if I read it correctly, also a respite care place.
The walk back by way of a city garden
Graffiti is a really big way to express yourself anywhere in the world but especially in France. Grenoble has certain areas where graffiti art is really celebrated and here next to this city garden is a really tall wall decorated with so many color blocks of words. I loved the sky painted into the one painting and how well it matched the real sky!
The pathway back was shaded by tall trees and was also a bike path. There were a lot of bicycle paths all over the city!
“Les 17 totems de la Nature en Ville” = 17 Symbols of Nature in the City
This garden was called Flaubert’s Arch, if I am reading this right, and was based off his paintings with the use of wildflowers and especially blue ones (like these blue Bachelor Buttons). Recycled items were used in this garden including the wooden poles creating the pergola of which flowering vines can grow up.
So fun to be in a city finding a second-hand painting where recycling and upcycling is elevated into art!
This walk turned out to be so much fun and I think I walked about four miles that day in almost a giant rectangle. I got back to our 2nd story BnB in time for Amy and I to grab some lunch and then get bathed and ready for the wedding.
And that is another fun story to come! 🙂
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little walk around part of Grenoble and this small visit to La Remise, which can mean “renovation” or “recycle.” Let me know if you have a better translation for the store’s name.
Wish I had found more shops to share but we only had such a short time in Paris and Grenoble. I hope to go back to France again one day and share more! <3
Happy fall, y’all! Acorns have been falling off our backyard oak trees since late August (just a few then, but still pretty early). So each Saturday morning since then, Mr. Ethereal begins mowing the lawns by blowing them off our back patio for me. Then, I go out and rake them all into a monster-size pile and scoop them into our waste bin to go to the dump.
A view from our living room windows after this Saturday’s acorn clean-up
FINALLY we are having cooler weather here in North Texas!! I have heard that this past August and September were the hottest months temperature-wise ever recorded in history, and I believe it. Once it got really hot in late July, I quit going outside pretty much at all during the day to weed in the garden, and just watered plants hoping they’d survive.
A view out our kitchen window of the neighbor’s lovely fall side garden. Do you see the monarch butterfly?
Thankfully, before we drove up to see our son and his family over the third weekend of June, we spent a few days building a drip irrigation system to keep things watered. It isn’t perfect, and needed tweaking, but it sure helped!
Most of the yards were watered once a day, but the southern side of the house got twice a day watering for some areas.
Let’s see how the garden fared… 🙂
Right outside of the kitchen and dining room windows, in two terracotta pots, are two climbers. This one is Claire Austin. At some point they will get planted in the ground.
We have to finish fixing the sprinkler lines before I can plant them, since we will be moving some lines around. The oak tree on the left grew so much (because someone was actually watering the lawn, that between its own girth and its roots, this oak tree has eaten our #2 valve and three water lines… Hubby isn’t too happy about it and has been working on the lines as he has time. We really need a professional. It’s on the docket for this fall. 🙂
Along the shed, I planted a couple of pink mums and a little trailing vine which can overwinter and is rated for zone 4 for cold (we are 8a here). The tradescantia pallida purpurea has really taken off with the cooler weather. It produces really pretty small purple flowers and hopefully will bloom once more before winter sets in.
Rosemary, a boxwood and more mums loving the 80 degree days… The mums replaced a few plants which died from overwatering. I’ll have to really figure out how to cut back on watering for some plants next season (less drip holes or use a valve to control water better).
Along the shady southern side of the shed, the climbing rose, one lavender and other plants made it. A hydrangea and another lavender were under and over-watered. Go figure! I bought the azalea, which likes more water, to plant in that dead lavender’s place. 😉
This holly is finally taking off and I am not going to clip any of it until next spring. However, did you know that hollies have an anti-freeze type ability? True. I won’t have to worry about wrapping this one anymore.
Last week I posted a video on Instagram of our backyard before I started weeding and the yard was looking really rough… It’s looking much better with just a couple of areas left to weed out. now for a good edging!
A hydrangea I thought didn’t make it is putting out new leaves, so I imagine it will do better next year. I will make sure to put more water lines around it (and closer to its roots) so it won’t freak out in the heat again.
The Lunar Eclipse
Hubby texted me from his mother’s yard at around 10:20 CST that the lunar eclipse was beginning (he drove over to mow her yard next ~ around 9:45am).
About 11am, all of a sudden it was slightly darker outback and then… I was encircled by all these beautiful horseshoes!!!!!
*I realized later that I was facing the wrong way to capture the moon crossing in front of the of the sun. This is photo #2.
This is the photograph I took with my iPhone 12 and I think I captured the moon (dark round object up-left of the sun) coming towards the sun. This was around 10:20am from out front of our house (#1 in chronological order).
This angle clearly shows the moon is now crossing down past the mid-point of the sun’s path. This time I was facing the right way… 😉 – Photo #3
Fixing our backyard sprinkler lines
And here is the beautiful shady oak tree which is slightly notorious for eating our spinkler lines…
Here you can see where the three dug holes are:
The one leading towards the front of the house is covered by a large concrete pot saucer (never used for the monster pot we had our mandarin orange tree sitting in in California, but somehow made it into our household goods in the storage unit).
The water-filled hole under the oak tree which fills every time we water using the system with certain lines.
The last hole is kind of obscured and is in the tree’s shadow to the right, next to the hose leading around the yard (hooked up to water along the back fence).
We purchased a new b-Hyve timer to run the six lines from inside the garage (two of which don’t work because of the valves eaten by this tree out back).
We liked it so much, we bought this second one to run the lines for all of the planter beds. One of the four hoses is set up just as a hose so I can hand-water. We can manually run each line if needed and that worked really well.
Some final images
Cooler temps have really benefitted the butterfly bushes the most as they are producing the prettiest lavender blooms. We have had bees and butterflies coming around so much more and the tomatoe plants are getting pollenated. I am hoping for winter tomatoes! (no photos)
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