January Renewal at Heart and Home

 I hope you had a fun and relaxing weekend! Hello to all of you, and a big thank you to all the new Heart and Home followers. I'm very honored and happy you chose to come along for the ride!  Welcome back for a look at January transformations,

aka the winter mantel-scape!

This weekend we finally got all the Christmas decorations boxed up and put back in the garage. The family and I worked together like a well oiled machine, and what took me almost four days to do took about 3 hours to undo! We put all eight million ornaments and nutcrackers and angels away in the blink of an eye! I always feel a sense of relief when we clear out the holiday stuff, I enjoy getting the house pared down, clean and fresh again, after living with an abundance of Christmas for the past month! I don't think the house feels really clean with all those pine needles dropping and scattering everywhere in the house! It took quite awhile for me to vacuum them all up, and they are still showing up in the weirdest places!

I thought I'd  start small, and tackle the living room mantel for my first New Year's redecorating project.  Here's a look at it over the past few months. During the summer:

In the Fall:  (for more go here)

The Christmas Mantel: ( you can see it up close here)

This is how it looked for a few days until I could muster the energy to think about redecorating for the rest of the winter. It was very refreshing to scale way back for a few days and let my mind and eyes rest a bit...

But this is way too scaled back for my taste!

I'm still searching for the perfect somethings for either side of the mirror -

right now I'm considering plates or some type of candle sconces. What do you think, any ideas?

In the meantime, I was excited to bring out my new glass cloche, which I picked up a few days ago with a gift card from my Mom-In-Law. (Thanks, N.!!)  It was calling my name as a wandered around my favorite shop!

I thought the birdies and their nests should come out of hiding for awhile.

Like many of you, I love to use a lot of white in January, as an antidote to the kaleidoscope of colors we just experienced over Christmas. White is calming and soothing, and wintry, too!

I found all of these little nests around here, some in our yard and others while out walking in the woods near our home. I found a giant one when we were up in our mountains,

hunting for our Christmas tree.

 I'll show it to you the next time, once I've found it a good spot!

That cute little blue bird was made for me by my youngest daughter. It's a sweet candle holder!

Up close these two don't look very happy. They both are grimacing at something - I wonder what?...

I'm done with this for now, on to the next thing!

What are you currently working on?  I'm so excited - I've got some big projects ahead, stay tuned for those! In the meantime, take some time to look around and visit for awhile. Keep those comments coming, and thanks for stopping by.  I'm so glad you're here!

Until next time,

XO

Heidi

Posted for DIY day, Trash to Treasure Tuesday, Three or More Tuesday, 

and  the new party Tablescape Tuesday at Grits and Glamour.

 Thank you Kimba, Kimm, Tam, and Barb.

For Thursday: Transformation Thursday at the Shabby Chic Cottage

and Thrifty Treasures at Tales from Bloggeriteville - hi Gina and Leigh. Thank you!

Great women, wonderful blogs - Go see them !

And check out the Friday Mantel party, with Beth: