French Ethereal is a lifestyle blog sharing tips on decorating, table settings, crafts, gardening, DIY and travel. I love an elegant Shabby Chic/Old World French decor all decorated with Faith. <3
Welcome to this week’s Share Your Style #377, dear friends!! Oh my goodness! There are so many ideas for sharing with family & friends for Valentine’s Day… Let’s take a look!
This link party is for home decor, DIY, crafts, recipes and the like, but you are more than welcome to share any of your family-friendly posts with us all. Please feel free to share this post too and join my small but loyal band of friends. I appreciate you! I appreciate your subscribing, also. As always, I am glad that you are here…💜
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!💜
As I finish up painting in our dining room, I wanted to thank all of you who shared your thoughts on how I should paint the lower wall and picture moulding below our chair rail. In the end, after going back and looking at pics from Versailles, I decided I really did love the Comet Dust grey wall color, so I carried it down below and used off-the-shelf Valspar Ultra-White on the mouldings. It’s looking good!
Since then, I’ve been dealing with sick dog… Lots of mopping in the kitchen and laundry room, carpet cleaning & laundry. He has had multiple baths, too. I think the extreme fluctuation in temps didn’t do him any good since he has to go outside to use the restroom. Plus I was painting indoors, where he is close to during the day… So, maybe that whole combination was the issue. He seems better now but I’ve held off finishing painting until later in the week, and only in small amounts. 🙂
So let’s look at this week’s features! I hope you will stop by and visit a few people while you are here. Everyone works soooo hard! 💜
Have a great week!
Here’s what I shared this past week atFrench Ethereal…
An Inspiration Challenge ~ Styling a Vintage Valentine’s Cloche ~ This is a link party if you’d like to come aboard and add ONLY CLOCHE posts with VALENTINE’S DAY DECOR IN THE CLOCHE. I’ve had to removed several posts which didn’t read the link up through. Thanks!!! 💜
And here are this week’s featured posts…
Karin from Karin’s Cottage shared a blast-to-the-past with her post ~ How Do You Style Velvet Pants? Yep, I had a whole pantsuit outfit. 😉
Lynne of Thrifting Wonderland has us sighing over her entryway in Two Flower Vignettes. Love the sweet petals dripped along the table runner!
Kathryn from The Dedicated House shared her Dining Room Paint Refresh. Looks great! 💜 Been there AND still painting ours. 💜
CoCo from The Crowned Goat shared this fun DIY project ~ DIY Valentine’s Mailbox. Adorable!!!
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 Valentine’s month, dear friends! Don’t you just love the month of February? I love wearing more pinks and reds than usual, wearing the heart-shaped diamond necklace even more than usual which Mr. Ethereal gave me for Christmas 35 years ago now, and reading everyone’s Valentine’s posts. February is such a happy month with volumes of inspiration!!!
We had an unexpected extra four days off this past week with the “Icepocolypse” hovering over the mid-west from Jan. 31-Feb. 3rd, so it has been rather like a six-day weekend. Really wonderful to have an extra week off during wintertime to get things done around the house! With it, I have been busy painting and working behind the scenes on Valentine’s posts… This is my second Valentine’s post as I guess the Valentine’s cake I made last month counts as my first. 😉
💜 My Inspiration 💜
I actually got the idea for this post from our friend Amber of Follow the Yellow Brick Home who linked up a post sharing how she decorated a large cloche she has with vintage Valentines:
I loved this post and chose it to feature it along with others at this past week’s Share Your Style, as you may recall. I love all the ephemera with antique buttons, sewing notions, the little birds and, of course, the vintage Valentines!! Amber’s cloche was part of a Pinterest Challenge which I missed last year. I think I just couldn’t get a post together in time; it happens! 😉
In revisiting Amber’s post this past week, I became inspired.
I thought, “Why don’t I do my own challenge?! Challenge myself to do something similar.
It’d be fun to create a cloche inspired by a cloche which was inspired by yet another blogger! You’ll have to check out Amber’s post to see who was her inspiration and the cloche this person created. Really cute!!! 💜
Now I knew we had done another cloche post with Cindy from County Road 407′s Pinterest Challenges! Where is it?…
Found it! I thought I’d share this one along with the Christmas cloche as with just a changeout of decor items, you get an entirely different look. This pheasant cloche was the first time I’d ever used an actual cloche in decorating. My daughter and I would use our small, glass-topped marble cheese board as a cloche for little Christmas displays, but never a large cloche.
Anyway, I digress!
These challenges are all about taking an inspiration photo and taking the idea and making it yours…
How I made this Vintage Valentine Cloche my own
First, I retrieved my cloche from atop our kitchen cabinet. It has been hugging little houses since early December… I snapped a bunch of photos to try and get posts created that month, but they never materialized.
Eventually, after Christmas, I moved the cloche display up above the cabinets for a nice wintertime display (another unpublished idea; it’s been that kind of winter).
It’s nice to share these two photographs here with you today!
So leaving the three little cottages up on their cake plate village green, I cleaned the cloche and began with ideas!
The small pile of Valentine-sy books, antique and new Valentines made to look old, and vintage hand-painted rose plates were all tried but didn’t work.
The sun was going down so I worked quickly to get a few sunlit shots.
I started with a pretty painted serving tray I spray painted white when we lived in our Prairie Home trailers.
Next, I added this little book by Susan Wheeler called We Belong Together ~ a Holly Pond Hill story. It won the spot inside the cloche for its size and sweet rabbits… and their love story.
Very cute, if you’ve never read any of Susan Wheeler’s books. Her artwork is beautiful, too! Heartwarming and ethereal… Can’t get any better than that, in my humble opinion! Several of her books have been in our bookshelves since the early or late 1990’s/early 2000’s.
Sidenote: As a sometimes artist, when you create something which is all your own, if you believe in it, others will too. 💜
I wish I had listened to my heart way back when and studied more art, but my father told me artists starve and artwork doesn’t sell. In this country, maybe. But Europeans and others appreciate good artwork more, and nowadays we have Etsy and other places to sell our beautiful creations. (I’m preaching to myself, more than anyone else!)
It may be harder, but you’ve got to have a BFA in Art plus a BS in Business to back it up. You’ve just got to promote yourself, don’t you think so?
I look at all of your artwork and think, that is my retirement: to be the artist I dreamed of being when I was a little girl.
Thirdly, I flipped through my small stack of Valentine’s cards and leaned them, laid each one down. None of those worked. Rejected many as being too big, too small.
Then I found these two: one is a note from a friend last year, and the young girl on the right-hand card is a true antique…
Hard to photograph through wavy, curving glass; however, she still looks sweet and ephemeral in her white dress and surrounded by roses…
The addition of a tear-shaped antimacassar my grandmother Rosa tatted almost a century ago and a Shabby Chic rose napkin ring completed this vignette. I scrunched up the antimacassar a bit in behind the book.
Please link up your Valentine’s cloche idea below, just for fun!! Can be old, can be new. Take a few moments later on to visit some of the folks who share theirs. 💜
The party is open as of now through February 14th at 12:00 noon, and I can send you the link for the link party in an email so you can put it on your post.
Should be a lot of fun!
My email is: french.ethereal@gmail.com
(Warning, though: I’m not great at creating parties for others to share, but if you help me when I get stuck, we should muddle through. I do have the link on Inlinkz to share with you! Really only my second attempt at a party on my own, although I put up Share Your Style all the time! Lol!!! 😉 )
Good evening, everyone! Welcome to this week’s Share Your Style #376. It’s officially February and all things Valentines is on repeat!! Since we have a third day off from school tomorrow, I may actually get a Valentine’s Day post out for you. 🙂
This link party is for home decor, DIY, crafts, recipes and the like, but you are more than welcome to share any of your family-friendly posts with us all. Please feel free to share this post too and join my small but loyal band of friends. I appreciate you! I appreciate your subscribing, also. As always, I am glad that you are here…💜
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!💜
My mother-in-law made it safely home from a month in California. She has been for home for about 10 days now and we got together over the weekend. We even went to our favorite thrift shop on Saturday, but didn’t find anything. That same day, I made a crockpot full of turkey meatballs in organic tomato sauce paired with cheese raviolis, plenty of leftovers.. Turned into a wonderful dinner. Yum!!!
We did better at Lowe’s as we scored some wonderful plant starts. I’ll share a post on the the things I found soon, but for now… It is too cold to be out in the shed working on potting up plants! At least for me. 😉
Well, let’s check out this week’s features, shall we?
Here’s what I shared this past week atFrench Ethereal…
Jeanie from The Marmelade Gypsy shared her post ~ And January Goes On! ~ all about what’s been going on up in her neck of the woods in Michigan. Check out the poor deer and what happened to him… A wonderful ending! 💜
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.
Good morning, dear friends! We have had two back-to-back snow days with an Arctic freeze welcoming in the month of February 2023!! The second for us this winter. Since I had the time and some paint left, I finished the baseboard moulding around the floor of the laundry area, so now that room is completely done!
But let’s take a look at where we started…
As some of y’all may know, when we bought this house here in North Texas in 2019, the whole thing was painted this taupe color. Even the ceilings were painted this color! I was happy to not have to paint upon moving in, but it’s too contemporary for me. Slowly, I have been going room by room and painting all of the rooms into a softer grey color, more of what I like.
The last home I lived in with my parents (1976-1987) was built with pecky cedar stacked logs. These logs were squared off, 8″ thick, and all of the walls inside that house were a dark rich reddish brown and when it was freshly oiled it was lovely!
I was okay with brown then because most of our rooms as my bedroom had big windows which let in a lot of light. I also didn’t know that I was affected by seasonal affective disorder (winter depression from lack of sunlight, for anyone who isn’t familiar with this term). I was always an outdoorsy kid, so it wasn’t a problem growing up. We were either at the beach on weekends (the four years in Hawaii during the 1970’s), I was cycling everywhere on weekends, plus I raised goats for milk so I was out milking them and soaking up sunshine daily. California is blessed with over 300 days of sunny skies each year, too. Great for keeping away the blues!
Just a little white paint (Valspar Ultra White 773957) straight off the shelf brightens the ceilings and the whole room!
Here in our Texas home
We are surrounded by four oak trees and a fruitless pear, so it is fairly dark indoors most of the year. In winter, we have a lot of light because the leaves are down, but come spring, the leaves will magically appear and it’ll become a cave indoors.
Okay, and also my eyes and hair are brown (well… now silver and brown, lol!). And, I used to wear a lot of brown, but I am SO OVER brown. I wear a lot of color to combat the brown look. 😉
Repainting all of these walls to something lighter was a necessity for me. I have been painting with Valspar “Comet Dust,” which is a color I last used when we renovated the kids’ bathroom upstairs at our last home. We opened up the area between the vanity and the rest of the bathroom. You can find those two posts here and here.
“Comet Dust” is a pretty silvery grey with blue undertones, depending upon the light. It sparkles in the sunlight! I painted these walls in eggshell (Valspar 773956 eggshell here in Texas rooms; satin in California).
Our master bedroom/bath paint refresh
Here is our bedroom in progress. I pulled out our 12′ ladder to paint the ceilings then switched to a long broom handle and painted from the floor for the last of three coats of paint. The ceiling was sooo dry that it needed three coats to really cover the taupe and to get rid of any streaks in my painting skills. 😉
Painting the Skylight Chimney
This next photograph will show you the ladder I used to get up into this chimney area. Thank goodness this ladder Mr. Ethereal picked up a year ago at a Black Friday sale is super sturdy as I sat on its top to paint this small area’s insides. It is designed so you can do that, too, btw.
This ladder was also great for standing on and turning around as needed to scrape the old paint off the skylight. Those paint marks drove me crazy whenever I’d look up! Sorry, I am a perfectionist that way. 🙂
A little scraping, Windex and some paper towels took care of that. I just needed to have the right ladder to get it done. 😉
Werner Multi-Position Pro 375 lb. Ladder
This ladder is one of those ladders where you can extend it, you can use it as an A-frame (pictured here) or as an extension ladder all one length. It can shorten. It can bend into a 3-sided “box,” if you will, so you can stand on it. Also, you can put two of them near each other and run a board across to use as a scaffold. It is really multi-functional! WORTH the money. (*not sponsored, just like the product a lot.)
Lowe’s isn’t carrying the exact model anymore but I found this one and it close. Ours is made of aluminum and this type linked is made with fiberglass. Maybe there were problems with our model (?), but so far Hubby has used it fully extended to fix a light on the upper roofline of his mom’s new home (while she was gone over Christmas; I held the bottom but didn’t really need to), and we had no problems. Once locked in, it’s solid. I felt perfectly safe sitting on top of it. It didn’t wiggle at all, like our six-foot A-frame ladder does.
Overall, it took three weekends to paint the whole area, minus the doors which I will hopefully remove this spring and paint all of them outdoors with a sprayer.
You’d think a smaller area would take less time to paint? You’d be wrong on that thought. It takes the same amount of time to paint this as a larger box room because of either having to move things around or just maneuvering in tight spaces.
We didn’t move the washer or dryer out because the gas and water lines were fully hooked up and it’s a pain to re-install them. Especially the gas line! Just didn’t want to cause an issue or get sick from low-lying propane not getting out of the house.
I was really careful stepping around that yellow gas line and obviously when moving the ladder legs around it. 🙂
Our surprise score!
When my mother-in-law and I went thrift shopping for items for the Odd Fellows Poker Tournament gift baskets towards the end of November or early December, I found this hanging rack! Coincidentally, I found the exact same one at Lowe’s this past weekend for $25.99. Great score!!
Originally I thought about using it in our bedroom closet so hubby could hang all up all of his baseball caps, but then I realized I loved it for the laundry room. It is larger (wider) than the cheap metal one the previous owners left up and ever prettier. The other was more like a broom hanging rack, like you’d put up in your garage. Gag…
This one is a little more modern and it really pops against the light grey walls. I love it!!!
And yes it is brown. 😉
We are really happy with how the laundry room turned out. Just after I had painted the ceiling, Hubby commented how much brighter the whole room looked even then.
It really looks nice now!
And here is our laundry room all put back together. I love its fresh new look and its ethereal French paint job!
Thanks for stopping by today! Leave me a comment about how you liked this post, if you would. SYS will be up later today in our Double-Header Wednesday.
Welcome to this week’s Share Your Style #375, dear friends! I’m excited to share all the cool features we have for you this week…
This link party is for home decor, DIY, crafts, recipes and the like, but you are more than welcome to share any of your family-friendly posts with us all. Please feel free to share this post too and join my small but loyal band of friends. I appreciate you! I appreciate your subscribing, also. As always, I am glad that you are here…💜
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!💜
Can you believe we are coming to the end of January 2023 already? It was just New Year’s and now we are speeding towards Valentine’s Day! With that, I’ve chosen some wonderful Valentine ideas for you.
So let’s get to this week’s features!
***Quick update on Thursday morning: I fell fast asleep as I was writing this and putting together this week’s SYS features last evening, so… I’m finishing this morning and actually POSTING IT. Lol!
I took half a Benedryl yesterday around 11am because I guess I’m now allergic to Prednisone. Anyway, it knocks me out and so somewhere around 7:30p.m., I was out for the night. I did make it through the school day and the hives never fully erupted, but I still feel itchy…
Anyway, happy to get this Valentine’s-y post out for you! Plus a touch of football, too. <3
Here’s what I shared this past week atFrench Ethereal…
MaryJo of Master”Pieces” of My Life shared a bunch of beautiful tablescapes for inspiration at your own home in this post ~ Setting the Mood for a Valentine’s Day Tablescape. I loved this alfresco setting!
Lynne from Thrifting Wonderland shares winter whites in her winter cupboard ~ Winter Display in the Hutch. Love all the creamware!!!
Lynne from Thrifting Wonderland also brings us a couple of easy and fun crafts to make for Valentine’s Day. I can see this being so fun with kids!!! Our double feature for this week ~ Two Quick Valentine’s Crafts.
Newcomer Shay from What the Fork shares this easy peasy recipe for Football Rice Krispie Treats! Perfect for this weekend’s big Super Bowl Game!!!
Debbee from Debbee’s Buzz shares her fun post (love all her tablescapes!) featuring 20 Sweet Valentine’s Day Ideas. Love it!!!
Last up for this week we have Meagan from Decorative Inspirations with her sweet post ~ How to Make a Salt Dough Garland. Love it!!!
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 Valentine’s Day, dear friends! If you are coming over for the first time from Carol’s place ~ Bluesky at Home, welcome to my blog, French Ethereal! Our host Cindy from County Road 407 has graciously allowed me to jump in last minute. I had Covid over the past couple of weeks and so happily I feel great now (those vaccines DO work!). I was excited when Cindy gave us our assignment this month to create a simple Valentine’s Day recipe.
Here is mine…
Yes, I used one box cake recipe and it turned out moist, chocolatey and delicious!!
I do make a lot of scratch cakes but this time it was all about making it easy! When we get so busy with life, a simple box cake is the easy way out, my friends.
Just like the box cakes my mother used to bake during my childhood, and I’d sometimes make for my own family, these are basically NO FAIL Betty Crocker and others are tried and true.
Easy peasy, as Cindy herself likes to say!
This baking center is inside our kitchen island. Ever since our first house, I’ve loved putting all of our baking things in one area! So convenient. How about you? Where do you store your baking goodies? What do you put in your kitchen island?
Which cake pan to use?
I have 8″ heart-shaped pans, which I have used in the past, and I have smaller heart-shaped tart tins, too. However, I thought it would be beautiful and fun to our rose bundt pan.
All of the years I was in the Victorian Tea Society in Riverside County, California, I had a couple of friends who had rose pans and their cakes looked so chic when dessert was served.
I was soooo excited when I found one a couple of years ago! It really turns out a stunning cake.
Just spray baking spray all over the inside, add some flour inside and tap it all around and into the grooves of the pan. Dump the excess flour out, bake at the prescribed temperature, and after 42 minutes baking in the oven, this cake was done!
And that’s all there is to this Rosy Valentine’s Cake! If you are starting here with me, we circle back up to Cindy at County Road 407. I know you will love Cindy’s Valentine’s Day extremely cute cherry pastry envelopes recipe idea! Adorable!!! <3
Don’t forget to follow the trail of posts below to see all the great recipes from today’s participants. Lots of fun ideas to create!!
More fun Valentine’s posts to enjoy…
If you’d like to check out some of my past Valentine’s ideas, here are a few to enjoy…
Welcome to this week’s Share Your Style #374, dear friends! As we come to the middle of January, we have lots of great features to share, including some Valentine’s ideas!
This link party is for home decor, DIY, crafts, recipes and the like, but you are more than welcome to share any of your family-friendly posts with us all. Please feel free to share this post too and join my small but loyal band of friends. I appreciate you! I appreciate your subscribing, also. As always, I am glad that you are here…💜
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 always amazing to me how quickly Valentine’s sneaks up on us on what feels like just a few short weeks after Christmas and New Year’s Days. I personally am still putting away Christmas decorations but only because Mr. Ethereal hung a new I-beam style system of 4x4s from over our garage door.
Going up and down from the attic to retrieve boxes was getting to be a chore, and also a little unsafe. Both of us are over 60 years of age and falling out of the attic space is always a real possibility. Critters ate through a few things, too, which ticked my husband off so he brought EVERYTHING down from above to clean, repair, throw away, and to find new homes in the shed, in this new hanging rail system, or to be given away.
So, I am reboxing ALL of our spring, summer, fall and winter decorations into tidy, black and yellow Big Box store boxes. Ugly colors (to me) but they do hang well and are very sturdy. The used boxes will store something new, go to my mother-in-law’s garage to rebox things she wishes to store, or be given away.
But in all of this, I am finding beautiful things to put in our hutch and onto our mantel to share hopefully soon. 🙂
While doing this, let’s check out our features, shall we?
Here’s what I shared this past week atFrench Ethereal…
Arctic Blast & Indoor Plant Overwintering, Production & Shed Insulating ~ prepping the garden to survive single digits (our thermometer registered -1 F. as the lowest temperature we had in our backyard). Also, this is a look at my first attempt at seed production. Hope you will take a look!
Sick at Home ~ Turns out I’ve had a third round of Covid, dear friends! I am thankfully feeling better and on an anti-viral, an antibiotic and a steroid. This particular strain of Covid tends towards bronchitis and not pneumonia, which is yucky but better for all. 🙂
Linda Kilsdonk from Paperseedlings shares her 1 year self-challenge to paint 365 birds. Come check out the beautiful birds she has drawn and painted! ~ #365birds November 2022.
Charlene from The Secret Life of Homesteaders shares good advice on How to Take Care of Chickens. Love this!! I have always wanted to keep chickens, if only I could get Mr. Ethereal to agree. 🙂
Emily from Hunny I’m Home DIY shares what to do with those waiting-to-be-used jar lids in her post ~ Rustic Farmhouse Mason Jar Lid Wreath. Easy and pretty!
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.
Here’s an update on how our shed/greenhouse is coming along, a year-and-a-half into the project…
Installing ceiling insulation
Early during Christmas week, Mr. Ethereal finally was ready to work some more on finishing the roof insulation project which he had begun during the summer. I had picked up big purple foam core insulation from Lowe’s or Home Depot (I forget which) and had the employee there cut them in half lengthwise for me.
After watching several YouTube videos on how to install this type of insulation, a couple of those contractors shared that we would need to add a baffle layer underneath to allow for air circulation and moving moisture up to the roof crest where it could escape. (lead photo)
So we began the project in early summer. Hubby was about a third of the way done when his work got really busy and he spent a lot of his weekends cleaning up our yards and his mother’s front and back yards.
When the cooler weather came along in fall, the purple insulation began falling down.
This wasn’t good… 🙁
What to do about falling insulation?
Hubby figured out a simple way to get the insulation to stay in place with the expansion/contraction of fluctuating temperatures: just install small pieces of wood shims, cut to length, and held in place with a wood screw.
Easy peasy fix! 🙂
Bringing in plants from outdoors came next for me! For those six days of extreme low temps, these guys were grateful to be indoors. Happily, the weather has warmed up again and they are back outside the shed enjoying sunshine and warmth!
As I finish this post, the roses are already pushing leaves! We had an 80 degree day on Wednesday then temps plummeted to 32 overnight. Yesterday was in the very high 50’s/low 60’s. I forget since my brain is a big foggy with another round of Covid… (Can you believe it?!)
But back to our shed story… 🙂
I took cuttings in early October of the tradescancha (purple trailing vine) and they rooted well, as did the angel wing begonia (rounded leaves in back). They are producing new babies and will be ready to put outside in pots in early spring.
I didn’t have good luck with the pentas or lantana. Rats! I put the blue lobelia in the ground and we shall see if it comes back after the freeze. Originally I had tossed it into the compost pile but I just didn’t have the heart to kill it outright. I hope the roots stayed alive and it’s worth the experiment to see if this root stock produces some blue lobelia for me! I would LOVE IT if I could get it to self-seed and propogate itself in the flower beds! It is soooo pretty…
The mondo grass is loving its life, as you can see (above). I will wait until mid-March and get them outdoors permanently. They do overwinter well here in North Texas.
Here are what our temperatures were doing on the 21st or 22nd of December as the cold front was coming in. The app almost never says “high” then “low.” It’s usually the reverse.
We dropped 23 degrees in like an hour-and-a-half. Did you experience the same where you live? It was the craziest thing! I was glad for layers of jackets, a windbreaker, and gloves!
Putting the garden to bed
I worked on stripping leaves off the roses and finished 10 rose bushes in one day, but less than a month later, they are already pushing new growth. Some have new leaves!
They’ve never really gone dormant this year, except for the Arctic storm.
February might bring in another Artic storm and that would kill of all of this new growth, so I will really have to wrap things well if another big storm rolls in again.
That’s what happened all of my panicle hydrangea blooms last year. I had to buy new hydrangea plants to have anything blooming.
The day the Christmas Arctic storm began, when temperatures dropped so rapidly in just a couple of hours, I raked tons of leaves over all of the plants after spreading the three bags of black mulch underneath most of the plants.
Some plants I also covered with plastic plant pots, and that really helped insulate them! I will be doing that again if need be in February.
And here’s how the yard looked with everything bedded down for Christmas Week Arctic Storm. Until we can afford to have an electrician come and run a heavy duty line to the back of the shed (it’s plumbed for it already), we run a heavy duty extension cord inside the window and swap out whatever we have plugged in.
Lately, I plug in the new heater for night, then plug in the new set of UV lights in the morning before the day begins. I am growing on the bibb lettuce, tomatoes and something else from seeds.
Here is the new little folding shelf unit I found during the Black Friday sales at Lowe’s. It’s lightweight for easy moving around, and perfect for starting seedlings (it’s intended purpose). It is a little Better Homes & Garden plant shelf. (None of this is sponsored,; just like the product.)
I started these seedlings right after Christmas and… You can see the light tube standing above these little seedlings.
Next I need to pot up the tomatoes.
I am giving everything here a very light liquid feed mixed in water every week and that is making them happy.
I repotted some of the baby Bibb lettuce here on MLK Jr.’s birthday Monday here in 2023! I still have three 3″ containers to pot up, but think I might just let them grow on and eat them as micro greens in a salad soon.
I learned on Garden Answer (YouTube) that you can sheer them back and they will grow again. At least I think that is correct. 😉
New heater & lighting
All of the plants are doing well. About mid to late February, I’ll begin giving the orange and lemon trees citrus fertilizer to get them producing flowers. I’ll hand-pollenate, like I did last year, to ensure good fruit production.
I just repotted the orange tree ~ it’s shocking a bit but should recover. One of the lemon trees could use a bigger pot, but otherwise, all are doing well.
Waiting for a good rain! The bougainvillea in the terracotta pot in front is pushing new leaves. 🙂
Rain is forecast for Wednesday this week and we could use it! California is inundated with rain this year (biggest in two decades). Now Texas is in drought conditions… Go figure. (Seems to follow us…)
Three baby begonias ~ will be ready for spring!
Well, friends, that’s about all that’s going on out in the garden and with the shed. I am really happy with how the plants are doing and I hope to report back on the little lettuce and tomatoes as they grown.
I may have lost the parent angel wing begonia, which was in the long Italian ceramic trough in the outdoor photograph above, but three of the four cuttings made it and rooted. One has quite a few new baby leaves! This is the first time in years that I’ve started cuttings.
My mom and I used to start spider plants and trailing ivy and other things when I lived at home, but I don’t think I have really rooted anything since. I did try with my mother-in-law’s plants last year, but almost all of those tries died…. If we’d have had this dry winter last year, we would have had a lot of success! Rats…
“Scumpy” in the winter leaves!
Yoda enjoyed being outside the past several days as we even had highs up to 80 degrees (Wednesday last week, 1/11/23, the day I came down with Covid). Highs in the upper 60’s and low 70’s since and he so enjoys the warmth!
Crossing my fingers and saying a little prayer that I can get the veggies planted out in March in new raised beds (yet to be built) for a real crop this year! <3
Sorry, gang! I am going to bow out of Share Your Style this evening as I am not feeling well. I have been cold at work all week, even with sweaters on. Bad head colds, Covid and flu are going around at school and in our community, so it is no surprise that finally something got me…
I hope you are all well and feeling peppy! I should be back to my usual self next week but will keep you posted.
Welcome to this week’s Share Your Style #373, dear friends!! Sorry this is going up a day late, but I HAD to get a big project done for our Odd Fellows lodge. It’s mostly done, my writing hand is very tired, but it’s just about ready to turn over (the project, that is). So, let’s hop into our features!!!
This link party is for home decor, DIY, crafts, recipes and the like, but you are more than welcome to share any of your family-friendly posts with us all. Please feel free to share this post too and join my small but loyal band of friends. I appreciate you! I appreciate your subscribing, also. As always, I am glad that you are here…💜
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!💜
Have you taken down your Christmas displays yet? I always find it a little sad but it is nice to have a clean slate for doing some winter whites in our living room. I’ll share how it looks now with you soon.
I know many of you are still celebrating the 12 days of Christmas with the Festival of Kings, until January 6th, when traditionally the Wise Men showed up to greet the baby Jesus, so there might be a few Christmas posts featured here again. 🙂
Let’s dig in!
And here are this week’s featured posts…
First up this week, we have Debra from Common Ground‘s beautiful hutch filled with Christmas pretties ~ Gathered for Christmas in the Holiday Cupboard. So pretty!!!
Our third friend, also named Debbee from Debbee’s Buzz, shared a lovely New Year’s Eve Tablesetting Ideas ~ Isn’t this penguin just the cutest?!!
We need something to put on all of our dinner tables this winter! Newcomer Michelle from The Wooden Spoon Effect brings us a yummy recipe called Simple Chili Mac Recipe. Perfect for our chilly winter weather! Welcome Michelle!! We are glad you are here. <3
Our second newcomer Sam from Simple Everyday Mom shared this really cute idea to make with your kids and grands!!! Welcome to you as well, Sam!! So happy you found us here at French Ethereal!
Vera from Veravise brings us a little New Year’s Eve in the Smoky Mountains ~ great place to visit, if you’ve never been there! This is where I went for my nephew’s wedding a year-and-a-half ago Memorial Day weekend.
And that’s it for this week, friends! A great bunch of holiday and supper recipe ideas, if you haven’t checked out last week’s SYS entries. I love looking back at your ideas and picking something to cook or bake, thank you. <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.