Happy Monday!

How was your holiday weekend?  Wasn't it fabulous to still have the weekend to recover after Christmas on Friday?  For the first time in a long time, I felt like I completely relaxed and enjoyed what was going on around me.  I hope that you can say the same.  It is almost hard to go back to my normal workday schedule today!

As 2015 comes to a close, I thought I would share a look back at some of my most popular DIY posts from the year.  It has been an exciting twelve months and I can't wait to see what 2016 holds.  I have big plans for this blog and my life and hope to be able to share them with you sometime this week.

For today, though, let's focus on the past, shall we? I'd love to know......which one of these projects was your favorite from the year?

My camera was very busy working over the past few months snapping pictures to share here and on Instagram.  I take a lot of pictures for my posts and then have to sort through them all to find the best pictures to share.  I enjoy snapping pictures at different angles and getting close up to see the details.    While most of those pictures didn't seem to fit into my earlier posts, they normally end up being my favorites.  I enjoy the blurry backgrounds and brightness that you can achieve by zooming in on single items.

To close out this Christmas blogging season, I'm sharing some of my favorite pictures that haven't been shared here on anderson + grant yet.  We will call it a mini Christmas tour of my house to highlight some of the details (and the kitchen) that you may not have seen.  These pictures will get you up close and personal with some of my favorite things from the holiday!

Thank you so much from the very bottom of my heart for visiting my home and sharing a part of the holiday season with me.  Have yourself a very merry Christmas, friends!

I've still got a few posts planned for next week, but I'm also planning some time for just sitting back and enjoying the season and time with family and friends.  Since the holidays are falling on Fridays, this is it for the series this year.  I'm guessing we all have a few more interesting things to keep us busy for a couple weeks!

So here is the final Friday Favorites of 2015.  Enjoy and have a wonderful weekend my friends!

As a child, each year at Christmas time I would decorate a small tree for my bedroom.  I guess that must have been an early indicator of my love of design.  The tree was about three feet tall and was a chance to personalize my space for the holidays.

I'd love to be able to know what my thoughts were back then as I placed my white angel on top of the tree.  Did I step back and analyze the placement of ornaments on each branch as I do now?  Was there a plan or style that I decided before starting the process?  Or did I just use the items that I had to make my tree festive for the season?

Happy Friday, sweet friends.  I hope that your weeks are beginning to fill with the joy and wonder of the holiday season.  It is time to slow down and take in the beautiful decorations you've taken the time to display, turn on some holiday tunes, and sip a cup of hot chocolate or peppermint coffee.  Fully immerse yourself in the Christmas spirit so that you don't wake up on December 26 with regret and realize that it is all over for another year.  I'd love to hear what you are doing this year to really be present in celebrating the real reasons for the season.

Last week for Friday Favorites, I focused on some of my favorite images from the Cherished Christmas Home Tour that I took part in.  Today I thought I'd branch out to some of the many other tours happening and share a few of the pictures that I found most inspiring.  For the most part, they are all very simple and clean.  It has me already thinking about my decorating for next year!

Have a wonderful weekend, and I'll see you back here on Monday!

Have you noticed that Christmas time brings out a lot of collaborations and tours?  I almost feel as though everywhere I turn on the internet lately is another picture of a perfectly decorated room or craft project.  (Although yesterday, my friend Ashley of Cherished Bliss shared a not-so-pretty glimpse at what our homes actually look like when a tour is being photographed.)

Today marks the last group and tour that I'm in for the year.  Promise.

Last year I joined in with these same bloggers for my entire house tour, but we decided to take it a little easier with less stress this year and not necessarily do a whole house tour.  That was a relief! The Home for the Holidays tour started yesterday and will conclude today.  Links and pictures to everyone's tours appear at the end of today's post.

This evening, I have the opportunity to participate in a gigantic holiday blog hop in partnership with Hometalk.com and CountryLiving.com.  There are so many people participating in this, each with their own unique ideas for decorating and creating this Christmas season.  I'd love for you to take some time to visit some of these talented bloggers.  The hashtag for this event is #homeforchristmas so you can use this throughout social media and on Hometalk.com to find additional participants in the event.

Creating something with your own two hands is one of the best feelings.  Regardless of what you are making or your level of expertise, being able to say you successful made something is incredibly rewarding.  Sometimes your skills may not match up with what you need to know for a project, but there is normally an alternative and way around the knowledge you may be lacking.  I find playing with different materials and experimenting to be incredibly soothing and relaxing.

Hello friends and welcome to my Christmas home!  I am honored to be partnering with Country Living and Ashley at Cherished Bliss today to share my holiday decorating along with some of my best blogging friends.  This is going to be an amazing week filled with some truly talented ladies.

The hardest area of the home to declutter is the sentimental items that you store as keepsakes, but there are a few decluttering tips to keep the amount manageable and in order. 


Welcome to the final post in our decluttering series!  Today we are each discussing sorting through sentimental items like photographs and keepsakes.


In the book, author Marie Kondo suggests doing this category of possessions last because they are the hardest to get rid of.  Through practice in decluttering clothes, books, and the other items in your home you should be more prepared for knowing what you should and shouldn't keep in terms of sentimental items.

I have a bit of a confession to make.....

I fear that I may have become a little bit of a shopaholic lately.  An intervention may be needed.

This cement finial was one of my most recent purchases.  Isn't it pretty?  The finial has been hand painted with Miss Mustard Seed's milk paint and then distressed.  The moment I saw it at an artisan market I knew that I just had to have it.  Just what an addict would say, right?

---

---

Good morning everyone!  I'm so thrilled today to be able to join in with 14 of my blogging friends and Country Living Magazine for a Pumpkin Palooza!  It is taking place all week across our blogs and I'm honored to be able to share the day with Heather from Setting for Four and Ashley from Little Glass Jar.

If you've been following along here at all over the past month, you've noticed that I've been using a lot of dry and preserved oak leaves in my decorating.  Every bare spot in my decor seems to look more complete with the addition of a few branches of them.  I hadn't really thought much about the process of drying leaves and figured there was nothing to share, but I've received so many questions and comments about the idea that I thought a post was needed.

This is by no means a complete or technical tutorial on preserving leaves.  It is merely what has worked for me based on my own experiences.

In my eyes, September is all about apples.  And I thought before the month was over I just had to share this recipe for Apple Danish Cheesecake with you.  It is seriously the most delicious dessert you can make this fall and is one of the easiest cheesecakes there is to create.

Happy Sunday!  I hope that your weekend is going well.  Today is the next installment in our decluttering series.  Have you been following along on the journey to finding what possessions bring you joy?


In case this is your first time here, each Sunday I'm joining some of my blogging friends in posting about my views about how to gain control over your clutter.  Many of us are focusing on things that we learned from The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.  Links to everyone participating appear at the end of this post.

Happy first day of fall!!!  How lucky am I that the day of my fall home tour falls on the start of the season.  I'm so excited to share what I've put together with you today.

If you are a follower of a+g, then you've been seeing little glimpses of my fall decor already, but today is everything in one place, plus lots of things you haven't seen.  

When you are done visiting my home, be sure to visit my friend's homes and see their amazing decor too as part of the Farmhouse Fall Tour of Homes, which started on Monday and runs through the end of the week.  We all have very similar styles, so it is really inspiring to look at what each of these other 14 gals has put together in their own homes.  Everyone's links appear at the end of this post.

So, today's post was supposed to be for my DIY pumpkin project.  But you know how sometimes plans just don't come together?  The plastic pumpkins are still sitting in my kitchen pumpkin patch in various stages of completion.  But I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to share everyone else's creative ideas for transforming a fake craft store pumpkin into something really unique and special. (And many of these could be done using real pumpkins, too.)

I don't know about you, but there are times when I see something for sale and immediately know I have to have it.  If you follow Liz Marie on instagram, you may recall that that she posted rustic birch bark pumpkins on her feed when they first came into the Target stores.  The minute I saw them, I wanted one (or three).  Problem is that I don't have a Target close to me.  And then went I did get to go, that particular store didn't have any.  Insert my sad face here.

---

---

Welcome back to the third week in our series on decluttering and sparking joy.   This week we are digging into our accessories and beauty products. 


This is an area where I think many of us struggle with clutter and having an excess of things we don't use because accessories and beauty products are relatively inexpensive and we want to experiment with new things.  Today's post will teach you everything you need to know to overcome this problem and I've created a few helpful printables to help you as well.

When I first settled on my green and cream color palette for this year's fall season, I got a little worried that maybe I had boxed myself into a corner.  Was I going to be able to buy, make, or find enough items for the house in that color scheme and not to look empty.  Living in a part of PA that doesn't seem to sell many white pumpkins or unique fall gourds, I got a little nervous that I was going to have to forego my plan and stick with a more traditional orange pumpkin color.

Over Labor Day weekend, I had the opportunity to visit an amazing farm market in the city.  I'll be sharing more about it tomorrow, but it was like this place knew I needed white and green pumpkins and gourds for decorating this year.  (My color theme for this year centers around a neutral color palette.  You can read more about it here.)

Hello everyone!  I'm so excited for you to be here today and join in the first ever Home Depot Virtual Workshop Party.  I was on cloud nine when Kelly from Live Laugh Rowe invited me to join in with her and an amazing group of bloggers.  All 24 of us were asked to create the same project, a rustic pumpkin stand, but style it in our own way for a given room of the house.  The links to everyone's creative take on the pumpkin appear at the end of this post.  The five of us in Kelly's group had the kitchen as our room to use the Rustic Pumpkin Stand.

---

---

Last year I was completely inspired by a Thanksgiving tablescape on Rooms for Rent.  Bre decorated her table with green pumpkins and mercury glass candleholders.  Absolutely stunning.  It got me thinking almost immediately about what I'd like to do for fall 2015 and I've been planning ever since.

If you saw my post yesterday, you got a glimpse at where my decorating ideas are headed.  But that was just a quick display without me going into full on decorating mode.    There is plenty more to come.

Before you sort through a single possession when decluttering your home, you have to understand what clutter is and how you want you space to look and feel when it is done.  This first post in a six part series guides you through this important beginning step.

---

---

I always feel the need to declutter and organize in the fall.  Something inside of me associates the season with new beginnings.  A new school year has always signaled a fresh start.  For that reason, our decluttering series is starting as we enter into the month of September.


When I posted a survey over a month ago, there was a resounding cry for a desire to learn about getting your life back on track.  Ninety-seven percent of you who took the survey said that you are interested in decluttering.   And over half of you are interested in the book that is taking the world by storm, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.

There seems to be a new trend in furniture of having chairs that are deconstructed.  Rather than perfectly upholstered pieces, we're seeing chairs that look as though they are waiting for the next step in the upholstery process.  I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the look.  Part of me loves the pretty (aka expensive) Restoration Hardware chairs, but some make me feel like the trend has gone too far.

I am seriously so excited to share this project with you today!  Over the past few months I've really tried to hone in on what my style actually is and follow my own heart and mind when designing.  In the blogging world I live in, it is some days a struggle to not be lead into doing what everyone else is doing.  This chair, as simple as it is, really is a representation of my style.

There are times when I believe fate plays perfectly into my DIY world.

When cleaning out my grandma's basement last month, my mom found an old wood crate that was missing its bottom and had a broken board.  Garbage, right?  For most people, yes.  But because she knows me so well, she asked if I wanted it. Perfectly aged wood?  Yeah!  I can use it for something!

Have you been seeing a lot of old, aged corbels being used in decorating?  The chipping paint.  The weathered wood.  Both things that call my name.  While I have wanted some for myself, I haven't been able to find any old ones in my price range.

The plan was to buy a new corbel from Lowes to paint and distress to look old......Fast and easy project.

Except have you seen the price of a wood corbel?!?!  It's over $50!  I practically fainted right there on the concrete floor in the trim aisle.  That idea wasn't going to work.