Releasing My Inner Martha

For most of my adult life I secretly wanted to be Martha Stewart. I never realized this, of course, in fact I didn't even know who Martha Stewart was for the majority of those years.

My desire would mainly surface at the end of summer. Every year at the arrival of autumn, when it was time to go back inside and turn on the heat, I wished to transform my home into a beautifully decorated palace. I ambitiously wanted to organize elegant dinner parties for friends and family to celebrate my birthday, or Christmas, or simply the season.

It has never happened the way I envisioned. Mainly due to lack of energy and creativity. By the time I had baked an apple pie or decorated the Christmas tree, I was pretty much done. I never spent the holidays at my apartment, anyway.

Now that I have a family of my own, I want to be like Martha even more. I wish to grow my own vegetables and cook wonderfully healthy meals every day (the zucchini soup is a start) whilst arranging roses cut from my own garden and decorating my barn. And with Halloween and Thanksgiving, there are even more holidays to celebrate now.

To make matters worse, I have become rather addicted to reading craft and decorating blogs. There are many Martha's out there, I tell you. Stay at home moms, career women, home schoolers, or any combination thereof. I share with these inspiring women a love of thrift stores, the Dollar Tree, yard sales, and spray paint. Not much else it seems, because I have no idea how they can work, raise children, run a household, whip out a crafty project every day and blog about it, too.

When we installed the windows, I vowed to make the barn more of a home. Now that we have space and light, it's time to decorate. It is a bit of a challenge though, since we have no shelves, no walls, no furniture suitable for decorating really. And of course, it has to be out of Lola's reach for the time being.

People without gardens can still garden. It's called container gardening, I did it for years. I would like to introduce the concept of Container Decorating. I took the last of my fruit crates, hung it and decorated it for All Hallows Eve.


There are two projects out there that I am particularly in love with: the googly eyes wreath and the faux mercury glass pumpkins. Having limited space and being on a copper kick still, I altered them to fit my needs. (Also, I am too cheap to buy 'funkins', I buy my all fakes at the dollar store.)



Lola helped too. She handled the hammer like a pro.



I am very pleased with my container, if I do say so myself. I feel confident Martha would approve, if only because I used her felt webbing.

Go check out more great ideas at Its So Very Cheri!