Spotted and Hearted

Nothing makes a girl feel better than having a lot of supportive friends.  Thanks so much for all of your kind comments.  We're trying to tackle one thing at a time around here.  It looks like we will have both apartments for a month so we can take our time (although I don't want to, I just want to get the move over with so we can have some fun and focus on Christmas around here.)

Speaking of Christmas, if you're looking for some holiday cheer, fun things are popping up all over town.  If you follow the tradition of setting out your shoes for Sinterklaas and you want to really be authentic, you can pick up chocolate letters at the old Dutch store (or you can order them online if you don't live locally).

Even if you don't need chocolates, I love just stopping by to look for fun Dutch candies and chocolates for stocking stuffers.

And have you been to Costco lately?  Who can pass up a huge, fresh wreath like this for $15.00?  They also have fresh 25' garlands for $15.00, and if I had already moved, I couldn't have resisted them!  Hurry, the garland tends to go fast.

Spotted and hearted

I miss the local blog, Your Heart Out.  They used to have a feature called "Spotted and Hearted" with snapshots highlighting things they spotted in local stores, and I've been thinking about it as I've been spotting really fun things while holiday shopping. I don't need most of these so maybe just taking photos of them and sharing will be enough retail therapy for me.

Since a lot of you don't live locally, I thought I'd start off with a big chain so this is what I spotted yesterday at Michael's :  small porcelain loaf pans for $1.00.  Wouldn't they be a great way to package small loaves of bread to deliver to neighbors?  I was tempted to buy like 20 of them and then I remembered that I don't bake bread.

 I also love the new Martha Stewart holiday line.  I might have picked up some baker's twine and washi tape for myself because it's on sale right now.

I'm tempted to go back to get this snowflake trim punch.  It would make really pretty packaging.