Turkey and Cranberries! Yeah!

Before you dig into that turkey, take a moment for each person to say one sentence beginning with…

“Today, I am grateful for…”

You will be surprised at what children say, so keep a notebook handy to write down the gratitudes, or, better yet, record the event.

Thanksgiving Decorating Tips

“Welcome to Our Home” Ideas

Holiday decorating isn’t just for Christmas! Door wreaths welcome all to your home and set the stage for celebrating. Make a simple wreath to hang on your front door with Thanksgiving colors–brown, russet, olive green. Use tree branches from your garden; attach a few gourds, nuts, and ribbons.

Place a gorgeous mum by your front door. You can plant it later and get flowers next Thanksgiving to use inside. It just takes one bright spot near your front door to attract the eye of arriving guests.

Wrap your front door with gift wrap appropriate to Thanksgiving.

Make a “welcome to our home” banner. Add your ribbons and fall leaves.

Group vines, pumpkins, and mums for display impact near the front entrance. Adjust the vines to add height and movement.

Fall Leaves make great interior and exterior decorations. Be sure to hose off any bugs!

Interior Holiday Decorating Tips

Tie ribbons around your candle bases and around your floral arrangements.

Set fall-color leaves under your decorations. Safety Tip: Keep leaves separated from melting candle wax.

Extend your flower arrangements with fall tree branches. Just one flower package makes a huge impact when you divide and spread it around.

Use copper, bronze, and gold spray paint to dress up plain gourds. Fill a glass or crystal bowl with the gourds, oranges, and nuts.

Display vegetables and mini pumpkins on a tray. Fill in any gaps with fall leaves, moss, straw, or wheat.

If orange clashes with your home’s interior, use green apples and spray paint the mini-pumpkins.

Did I already say leaves? Here’s another way to add fall color: Place the leaves in your green potted-plants.

One beautiful way to kick off your holiday season: Wrap tiny gifts in gold foil; top off with brown and russet ribbons, and place the gifts on the dinner plate. Your table will look fabulous and your guests will love the thought.

Simplicity: the Art of Home Decorating

If you’re thinking about breaking the bank for the sake of a beautiful room, think again. You don’t have to spend as much as an oil tycoon to have a home every bit as beautiful. Here’s why:

A pair of human eyes can only take in so much, no matter how much is put before them.

The secret is not to aim for beauty that comes from opulence, but for a simple beauty. And simple beauty is usually less expensive.

The best way to go for simple beauty in interior design is to make the focus of a room a single well-chosen decorative element.

Art Prints: Simple Home Décor Focus

But what single beautiful element could you actually afford?

Unless you happen to get really, really lucky at a crafts fair or estate sale, there’s only one sure way to buy high taste on a low budget. Not original paintings or expensive wallpaper. Just a well-chosen print of a painting or photograph that reflects your style and taste and matches your room.

Surprised at such a simple answer to the decorating conundrum? Perhaps, like most people, you do not understand what art prints really are.

What Art Prints Are Not

Art prints are not posters.

Posters are made using paper stock similar to what magazines use. Art prints are made using special heavier print stock especially for prints.

Posters often play rather loose with the original image, cropping it, resizing it, adding text, or even changing shading. Prints will typically come much closer to the original, and will rarely crop the original image or alter its appearance significantly.

Posters are vastly less durable than art prints. You can expect a high-quality print to last decades without showing signs of age.

Art prints are not reproductions (though they are close).

Reproductions of a work of art, usually a painting, involve using exactly or nearly exactly the same brush strokes and materials, which is why they are so expensive. Prints, meanwhile, reproduce the look of the artwork without reproducing every detail of it. For instance, even though many prints of paintings use textured surfaces or even artificial brush strokes, the exact brush strokes of the original are not copied.

Reproductions also have to be conserved as carefully as original paintings in most cases, or they will fade. High-quality prints are given protection against fading, either in the form of a coating to the surface, or a Plexiglas case.

Reproductions, being paintings, are not very durable, and must be treated with special care. Prints, though not indestructible, are more likely to survive accidents. Some prints can even be washed with glass cleaner.

If you have never been to a garage sale, it is easy to come home with a carload of bargains you have neither use nor room for. A chair for a dollar is no bargain if you already have ten more chairs than you need. As a veteran yard-saler myself, let me offer these tips for the yard-saleing newbie:

1. Make a list of what you need and stick to it. And that means even if you discover a cheap treasure you “might be able to use sometime.” Believe me, in six months you will be selling it at your own yard sale - for half the price!

2. Measure your room, windows and available space for certain furniture needs. And speaking from experience, remember to take the list with you!

3. Make a list of addresses and short instructions about how to get there. Check the classifieds and free shopper ads for times and rules. Some people get very grumpy if you interrupt their sleep by showing up at their home two hours before the sale starts.

4. Keep small bills in your hand and leave large bills in your purse. If you take out a big roll of large bills, there is not a vendor alive who will give you a lower bargain price for the item you want. They want their share of that roll!

5. Go early in the morning or late in the afternoon. Getting to a yard sale before its “picked over” assures you can find more that you might be able to use. When you visit a yard sale later in the afternoon, vendors are more likely to take much less for the items they still have because they don’t want to pack them back in the garage! You might be able to find some good bargains for furniture that was overpriced earlier.

6. Take a partner with you. Share with your partner what each of you is looking for and spread out. You can cover twice as much distance in half the time!

7. Pick up everything you think you might want. You can always put it back. And if you don’t pick it up when you see it, chances are someone else will spy it and buy it!

8. Choose furniture with good bones such as solid wood construction and dovetailing. Its much easier to refinish a good piece. Shoddily made furniture will still be shoddy after you redo it.

9. If you find drapes, scarves, sheets or bedspreads in a fabric that blends with your d�cor, buy it to use for reupholstering a used chair, to make pillows for your room or dozens of other uses.

10. Picture frames, even empty ones, can be painted or stained to create new looks. You can always find unframed art you like and with the help of creative matting, you can make it all work together.

And one more thing - I have no scientific proof for this opinion, but I have found it true time after time - the bigger the sign, the lousier the yard sale. Its as if they are using a large sign to make up for the lack of merchandise to attract buyers.

As a rule, honed finishes are more susceptible to soiling than polished finishes, because a honed surface is slightly more porous and absorptive than polished finish. However, the honed finish is easier to restore because it will sustain harsher cleaning efforts.

Normal maintenance of honed finishes involves as-needed washing with clean water and mildly abrasive cleaners, which retain a pumice-type finish, while the cleaners remove soils. There are thick liquid cleaners and chlorine-bleach type scouring powders commercially available.

The marble should be wet with clean, hot water. Then using a mildly abrasive alkaline cleaner and stiff bristle brush, wash in overlapping, swirling strokes. Suds can be left to stand for several minutes to permit the bleaching agents to work on the stains and dirts. Rinse thoroughly and dry with cotton, cotton flannel, burlap or chamois skin. Wipe well to avoid streaking.

If further cleaning is required, use a special treatment or make a paste to the consistency of syrup using a mildly abrasive alkaline cleaning powder if necessary. Rinse thoroughly and dry.

The products for the maintenance of Honed Marble and all other stone is available from http://www.marblemasteruk.com/shop

You can buy packaged, basic Roman shades from most home stores, but you can also make or buy customized Roman shades. Roman shades are one of the most simple homemade window treatment projects. It is a great project for beginning home decorators. You can find free instructions to make them on the Internet. When you make your own Roman shades, you select the fabric, the spacing, and the style of Roman shade. The needed supplies, other than the fabric, are very inexpensive. You can make Roman shades without a sewing machine, but it will take much longer. The price of the fabric depends on the quality you select, but fabric stores carry lots of inexpensive fabrics.

You can also commission a local interior designer to design and make custom shades for you. The designer may suggest fabrics or styles you would have never thought of, and will make the Roman shades quickly. It will cost significantly more than if you made the custom Roman shades yourself.