The Hicks | Hicks House

This holiday season seemed to come out of nowhere. I feel like it was just Thanksgiving and now we’re days away from Christmas. Earlier in the year when we were arranging furniture we had a plan for how we were going to decorate, where we were going to put the tree whether we were going to get a real tree this year to commemorate our first year in the house. What we were going to send for Christmas cards, all planned out.

It all snuck up so fast we ended up doing absolutely nothing.

No tree – it seemed like way too much work to set it up for only two weeks then have to take it down.

No wreath – This actually did get unpacked and was going to get hung on the front door with a Command hook however the package instructions said to apply in 50 degree or warmer temperatures. Since we’re hovering around 20 that didn’t happen.

No Christmas Cards – we did order an Elf costume for Chloe and took some sub-par photos with my cell phone and had a plan to take “real” pictures with the camera and order cards but it never happened.

Here’s your Christmas Card

I’m looking forward to seeing friends and family over the holidays but as for the decorating … maybe next year.

We did make Christmas cookies for my annual Cookie swap at work. I found This recipe on Pinterest and it looked easy and pretty. I mean it’s sugar cookies how hard could it be?

look how pretty they are!

NOT EASY First off I don’t think I realized just how much flour is in sugar cookies. My kitchen was covered – flour everywhere. Also because I had to make so many I thought it would be easier to make a whole batch of colored dough rather than splitting the batch in half per the recipe directions. That’s all well and good until you roll out your full batch of colored dough and your full batch of regular dough and it takes up the ENTIRE island then you have to pick up one and lay it on top of the other. Never again I tell you… Never again…

I didn’t even attempt the pretty sprinkled edges after that debacle. I was sure it was going to be a complete disaster when I went to cut it into cookie rounds that it was going to smoosh and turn into a giant blob. Luckily that was the only part that went ok. The first batch tasted kind of floury so we topped all the additional ones with extra sugar before baking and that helped.

Not as pretty… but not too bad..

How about you did you go all out and decorate for Christmas this year? Or did the late in the year Thanksgiving have you saying “Maybe next year…” like it did for us?

We’ve done a lot of work in the Guest Room since moving into our new house. The original room inspiration and all the work can be seen here, here and here. It’s coming along :-).

I really wanted some throw pillows for the bed (I LOVE throw pillows) however neither of us could decide if we wanted the accent color to be light blue or yellow – so we decided to make it changeable so depending on the season or our mood we could change it up. I started with the yellow accent pillows and added a zipper to my homemade pillow covers to that I could re-use the pillow insert.

here’s how it’s done

I started with the pillow insert I was going to use and measured the entire width and height of the pillow.

make sure to go seam to seam

Your fabric needs to be 1 inch wider than your pillow to allow for a 1/2 inch seam allowance and 1 1/4 inches longer to allow for the seam allowance on the top and the zipper insert on the bottom. My pillow was 21 inches square so for my fabric I had to cut out two pannels to be 22×22 1/4.

Draw out your measurements on the BACK of your fabric. If you have a directional pattern like my chevron make sure the lines are straight with the pattern not with the top of your fabric. Its not always the same thing.

see how my line doesn’t line up with the edge of the fabric?

one cut the chevrons are even

iron your fabric pieces

Lay your ironed fabric pieces out and line up the zipper on the longer side of the fabric facing down towards the side of the fabric. I used a 12-inch zipper so I centered it on my 22 inches of fabric. You can use a zipper the entire length of your pillow – its probably easier but thats what I had on hand.

zipper pull should face down

pin in place

Sew the zipper to the fabric using a zipper foot. Make sure to not sew around the zipper pull. When you reach the pull manually wind your needle down into the fabric lift the foot and zip the zipper out of the way so you can continue sewing a straight line. Make sure to backstitch at the begining and end so your zipper stays put.

attach the first side of the zipper

Do the same process for the other side of the zipper. Make sure the right sides of your fabric are facing each other.

repeat the process with the other side.

Now you have two fabric squares attached in the middle with a zipper.

Fold in half right sides together at the zipper and pin the pieces together around the entire perimeter – make sure your zipper is at least half unzipped so that you can turn it right side out when you are done.