One of the things I was super excited about when we painted our bedroom gray was that we would be able to have Christmas bedding. Seriously. Up until this spring our bedroom had blue and yellow wallpaper and that is just not a good combo with red.

Once I I had a neutral backdrop to work with I started gathering Christmas sheets and pillows. I found red checkered sheets (Dale says it’s like sleeping in a bread basket) and also red sheets with white snowflakes. (As an aside . . . can I just say how hard it is to find Christmas sheets that aren’t flannel?!? I get too hot for flannel so it’s not an option for me and I can’t be the only one who prefers percale. Don’t people in Florida want Christmas sheets?) I found red and white striped ticking to cover our big square euro pillows. But the one thing I couldn’t find was shams for our regular sized pillows.

Enter the Cricut.

I bought plain white pillow covers with pom poms on Amazon and then came up with a design for them. I went through a few iterations but finally settled on this Merry & Bright in red heat transfer vinyl.

I’m really happy with how they look with our other pillows, it’s cozy and just how I pictured it would be.

Christmas bedding designed by me. How ’bout that.

Sean came over last Friday and he brought coffee and biscuits – and that was fabulous! He also brought his 10″ Potholder PRO Loom from Harrisville Designs. I knew this day was coming so I had already bought a few bags of loops in the colors of my kitchen. In other words – I was prepared.

Sean showed me how to get started and helped me through the first one. I had a few dicey moments but it (mostly) came out perfectly. And then he went on about his day but he left the loom with me. So I made another.

And then on Sunday, while watching football, I made a third.

They are BIG and all cotton and thick and just awesome as potholders and trivets, too. It takes about an hour to make one, which is way faster than knitting, and the Potholder Pattern Wizard makes is super fun and simple to create your own unique designs.

I may be holding Sean’s loom hostage for a while. Just sayin.

We have a flat screen TV on the wall in our bedroom. However, we hardly ever watch TV in the bedroom. Now, if this were up to me this TV would get regular use as I truly enjoying snuggling in bed and watching TV. Dale, though? Not so much. He’s a couch sitter when it comes to watching TV. And so, the TV in the bedroom only gets used on rare occasions. Late night football games. The Academy Awards. When one of us is sick.

In the interest of making our bedroom prettier, I decided to cover up that rarely used TV with a canvas print of one of my photos from summer vacation.

This print is just the right size for the TV and the wooden bar at the top catches perfectly on the TV. Sure, you can see a tiny strip of the TV below the print but mostly – it’s gone. And I’d much rather look at that picture of a beach umbrella than a black TV screen.

Pretty clever, eh?