Halloween Decor - Taking It Outside!

If you saw our previous post about Halloween decorating, then you know this is a special holiday for us, since it's also our anniversary!
Here are some more photos of the inside of Quince Cottage.

Dining Room © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Close up of one of our vignettes © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Halloween Mantel © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

And at night...

Night © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

We had a couple of weeks of unrelenting rain here in North Carolina which messed up our decorating schedule, but we've more or less finished and want to share some photos with you!
Here's the full effect in daylight...

Halloween at Quince Cottage © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Here it is at dusk...

Halloween © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Halloween © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

We thought the lanterns needed a little something-something, so we added orange bulbs and simple spiders we cut out of construction paper and taped to the glass.

Lantern © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Graveyard © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

And here's a close up of our "graveyard" and our fountain, now a "skull compote" of sorts. To be honest, the darker skulls were a threesome that are supposed to light up and make scary noises, and be stuck in the ground on stakes. Unfortunately they didn't work this year, so we dumped them in the fountain and added a couple of Dollar Store skulls, some dead leaves, and cobwebs.

Final Resting Place © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

On a less creepy note, we decided to keep our summer pillows and work with the yellow/gold and lavender/plum scheme, because those also create an excellent autumn palette. The fact that it's a little different from the usual orange/brown/red scheme is actually fine.
Being different is a good thing, right?

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Here's a closeup of our urn. We felt bad about ripping living plants out of the urns, so we simply took a grapevine wreath, placed it on top of the urn, then pulled some of the ivy and Impatience over the top. Next we set the pumpkin on an upside down flower pot in the center, and finally tucked in some faux berries from Michael's.

Urn © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

We hope you enjoyed this little tour of our scary-but-not-too scary front porch!

While we were hard at work decorating, Buster was dreaming of being a unicorn.

Unicorn Buster © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

(Actually that's a water buffalo horn he was gnawing before dozing off).

Come back again soon, we've got some great DIY projects in the works and a couple we've actually finished and are ready to share!

Quince Cottage Style mixes old and new, rustic and opulent. 

Our goal is to make our new subdivision house look inviting, beautiful, and as though it wasn't born yesterday

Pumpkin Apple Bundt Cake

Welcome back to Quince Cottage!
With autumn well underway, you may or may not have had your fill of "pumpkin everything". If you haven't, then this is a recipe you'll want to try. It's a moist, dense, not overly sweet, not screamingly pumpkin, cake - ideal for breakfast, brunch, snack, or dessert.
We found it on Pinterest (of course) and credit goes to JuliasAlbum(dot)com. We made only a few changes in terms of ingredients.

Pumpkin Apple Bundt Cake © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Ingredients:
2 eggs
3/4 C white granulated sugar
1/2 C brown sugar
2/3 C vegetable oil
1 TBS vanilla extract
1 C pumpkin puree
2 C all-purpose flour, sifted
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
4 C apples, cored, peeled and diced (about 6 small-medium apples)

Caramel sauce (you can make your own, but we bought a jar)
1/3 C chopped pecans

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. In a medium bowl, using an electric mixer, beat eggs, white and brown sugar until light in color and creamy, about 4-5 minutes.
3. Add oil and vanilla extract and beat 1-2 minutes more. Add pumpkin puree and beat 1 more minute.
4. In a separate medium bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon.
5. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and stir just until combined. Fold in apples.
6. Spray bundt pan with baking spray. Pour batter into pan.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for 50-60 minutes (toothpick test). Let the cake cool on a wire rack about 40 minutes. Invert the bundt pan onto a serving platter and let cake cool completely.
8. When ready to serve drizzle caramel sauce over the cake (suit your own tastes in terms of how much you use) and then sprinkle pecans over the cake.

This cake is really better after sitting for a day, lightly wrapped, so by all means make it a day ahead of when you actually need it!

Pumpkin Apple Bundt Cake © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Pumpkin Apple Bundt Cake © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

You could easily substitute pears for the apples, walnuts for the pecans, etc. At Quince Cottage, we like recipes that are flexible as well as delicious. Enjoy!
Unfortunately this was not a treat we shared with our Irish Jack Russell Terriers - except for a few chunks of apple. You can imagine how hard it is to resist spoiling them.

Daisy and Buster © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Come back soon--we'll be sharing our outdoor Halloween decor!

Quince Cottage Style mixes old and new, rustic and opulent. 

Our goal is to make our new subdivision house look inviting and beautiful, 

and as though it wasn't born yesterday.

Halloween! Quince Cottage Goes Wonderfully Witchy!

Boo!
Hope we didn't scare you (much)! Halloween is our favorite holiday-we even chose it for our wedding. Dressing up in costume, eating lots of candy...what's not to like?
As you might expect, we love Halloween decorating and have accumulated a fair amount of "stuff" over the years. But, with each move, we've pared away a few things that we no longer like quite as much, and we find new ways to style our displays.
I think this might be the best year yet!
Of course there are lots of pumpkins, real and "faux". I painted some of the fake ones white.

Fake white pumpkin © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

That woven paisley is an antique Victorian wrap we got in New Hampshire quite a few years ago. Moths have made inroads, but if we fold the fabric a certain way, it looks just as brilliant and perfect as the day it was made.

Here's a macro of the buffet, with bats!

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

And naturally we did our mantel.

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Here's a close up of the left side, crystal balls and cobwebs y'all...

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolt

And here's the right. Notice something in the mirror? Pretty nifty Dollar Store "ghost", don't you think? What should we name her?

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

And we Halloweened up our foyer. Like our new verb? Thought you would...

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

There's a tablescape in our family room. That skull raised a few eyebrows at London's Gatwick airport when we went through Security. The skeleton figure is from Marie Leveau's shop in New Orleans. The head in the cage is a plaster cast of a sculpture Rhiann did at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. His name is Charlie. He scares the bejeepers out of our older daughter.

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Here it is at night with the little battery-powered votives.

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Oh, here's an extra little treat for you...some Halloween costumes we've worn over the years.
One year Rhiann was dead Lucrezia Borgia, misunderstood medieval poisoner, and Ron was dead Marquis de Sade.

Marquis de Sade and Lucrezia Borgia

Here's our little one as a mime several years ago.

Mime © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

We still think this corn muffin costume might be the best one ever. It was Little One's suggestion, because corn muffins were one of the few foods she ate at that time. Big One was a lady vampire. A few years later, she developed a Twilight obsession. Hmm...

Lady Vampire & Corn Muffin © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Here's Daisy.

Daisy as Mulan © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

She wasn't the least bit on board with the costume idea. She was plotting her revenge-you can see it in her eyes.

She's equally unimpressed with Halloween decorating.

Daisy © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Next time we'll share photos of our spooky-licious outdoor Halloween decor, assuming Hurricane Joaqin doesn't break our house.
Also, we're trying a pumpkin-apple bundt cake with caramel pecan glaze. If it turns out as good as it looks in the photos, we'll share the recipe.

Quince Cottage Style mixes old and new, rustic and opulent. Our goal is to make our new subdivision house look inviting and beautiful, and as though it wasn't born yesterday.

Something About This Old Dresser - DIY

Hey there, welcome back to Quince Cottage! We hope you're enjoying the autumn weather, wherever you may be.
Do you love to go thrifting/antiquing/junkin'? We do! If we have a specific item in mind, it's like a treasure hunt, but sometimes we go just to see what's out there, and find treasure accidentally.
Recently we were looking for a dresser for our master bedroom. The one we had was smallish, and not well-made. Ron hated it. I was kind of meh about it. Anyway, we checked our local thrift/antique stores, scoured Craigslist and local online yard sales, and a few came close. Unfortunately they were either too beat up, too big, too small, or too expensive.
Then one day we checked out a place in Raleigh that changed hands not too long ago, and a dresser caught our eye. The curvy profile, along with the wood's beautiful color and graining made us take a closer look. The drawers actually slid quite well. It wasn't missing a leg. And the price? It was pretty reasonable.

Dresser in shop © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Not wanting to make a hasty decision, we continued through the rest of the shop. And then we saw another piece.

We both had this kind of reaction...




By the way, our dog Buster is a LOT like Doug in terms of personality.

Buster © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

But I digress...

We hemmed and hawed. What should we do? Buy just one piece? If so, which one? We'd really been looking for a dresser, but maybe an armoire could take its place, if we added shelves...

Or maybe the owner would give us a great deal if we took both? We asked. He said he would. We weren't sure where the armoire would even fit anywhere in our home. Measurements were taken. We went back the next day and bought them both!
Here they are in our garage. That's the back of the armoire. Definitely a home-made piece, which is a good part of its charm.

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

However, this is the dresser's story (the armoire will get its turn later on down the road). Yes, I did say the color and grain of certain parts of the dresser were gorgeous. Other parts, not so much.

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

The wood on the drawer fronts and top was lovely, but dried out and dirty.

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

The finish wasn't original on the other parts (kind of orange-y and shellacked). What to do? If you're offended by the painting of furniture, you'd best leave now...

We'd seen another dresser in a different shop that had been partially painted and it looked fabulous (the price tag, not so much). We decided to hack the look. Ron thoroughly cleaned the whole piece, and put a coat of clear acrylic polyurethane on the drawers' interiors. He also replaced a missing drawer stop with a piece of paint stirrer, and waxed the drawer runners with a candle to make them slide even more smoothly. He took the mirror off and removed its supports. Next he taped off the parts of the dresser he didn't want to paint (the lovely grainy parts).

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Then he applied a coat of green latex paint.

 Note replaced drawer stop © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Once it was dry, he sanded it off in areas that would naturally become worn (and this is a really key step in creating an authentically distressed look).

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Then he wiped dark stain along those sanded areas.

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Finally, after the stain dried, he applied paste wax to the entire piece. Waxing really brings out the warmth and beauty of wood grain and helps prevent it from drying out.

Drawers before paste wax © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Drawers after paste wax © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Next we put the mirror back in place, lined the drawers with paper, and moved the dresser to its destination, where we styled it for fall!

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Here it is a little more lit up.

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Thank you for visiting, we hope you come back soon!

Quince Cottage Style mixes old and new, rustic and opulent. Our goal is to make our

 new subdivision house look inviting and beautiful,

and as though it wasn't born yesterday. 

Sesame Chicken

Take-out Chinese is a favorite at Quince Cottage, but in the interests of trying new things and saving a little bit of cash, we sometimes do a combo of homemade and restaurant. Case in point, this lovely Sesame Chicken dish below. We got this recipe from a local flyer and changed it up a bit to make the flavor brighter.

Sesame Chicken © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Like all Quince Cottage tested and approved recipes, this one's easy, customizable (to a degree), and yummy. We ordered shrimp egg rolls and some lo mein to go with it.

RECIPE:

Ingredients
Sauce 
2 TBS reduced sodium soy sauce
2 TBS orange juice (if you use fresh, grate a 1/4 tsp or so of peel and add)
1 1/2 tsp toasted sesame oil (ideal, but canola oil would work)
2 1/2 tsp brown sugar (honey would probably work too)
2  tsp rice vinegar (ideal, but apple cider would also work)
1 (1 inch) piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated (store extra ginger in a baggie in the freezer)
1/2 tsp minced garlic in oil
2 TBS sesame seeds
1 TBS cornstarch
Chicken
1 egg
2 TBS cornstarch
Pinch salt
Pinch pepper
1 lb. boneless skinless chicken (breast or thigh meat)
Garnish with chopped scallions if desired

Directions
1. In a small bowl stir together soy sauce, OJ, oil, brown sugar, vinegar, ginger, garlic, sesame seeds and cornstarch
2. To prepare chicken, whisk together egg, cornstarch, salt and pepper. Cut chicken into 1" pieces. Toss chicken in egg mixture.
3. Heat vegetable oil in large skillet over medium-high heat. When oil is very hot, add chicken. Cook, stirring occasionally, until chicken is golden brown and cooked through (7-10 minutes). Drain off excess oil if desired.
4. Pour sauce over chicken. Toss to coat. Sauce will thicken as it heats. Remove from stove when heated through and sufficiently thickened. Serve to plate and garnish with scallions if desired.

And since no post is complete without a picture of at least one of our cute Irish Jack Russells, here's Buster with his all-time favorite toy. It's going to be a tragic day when that thing gives up the ghost.

Buster © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Quince Cottage style is where rustic and sparkly rub shoulders. 

Think gilded mirror against a plank wall, and you'll know what we mean. 

We prefer our opulence a little beat up and our recipes 

GOOF-PROOF!

DIY - Kitchen Cabinet Hardware Part II Installation

Hey there, welcome back to Quince Cottage!
Once the fun of choosing cabinet hardware is over, it's time to get down to business and install it. In our last house this was done by the builder's crew. Let's just say they weren't as picky as we are. There were pulls that were cock-eyed and out of alignment. Not by a whole lot, but it really brings the kitchen design down a couple of notches when this happens.
You know what we're going to say next, right? Yep. Measure twice, drill once. To find the exact center of a drawer, if that's where you want a single knob installed, then simply make two diagonal lines that intersect at the precise center. (This is actually our older daughter's bathroom vanity, by the way).

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Once you've made your pencil mark, drill straight through the drawer, then insert the knob stem and use the nut provided to hold it in place.

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

There are some handy gadgets out there to help make sure your placement remains consistent.And here is a mounting template from Lowe's, which costs less than $5 and is really helpful when you aren't mounting something in the exact middle.

See? Here's Ron, using it for a long kitchen drawer which needed two pulls. Measure in from each side of the drawer with a ruler for getting the spacing you want across the front of the drawer, then choose the template holes which match the width of your pull and the desired up/down placement. You can see the pulls we used on the cabinet doors in the same photo.

© Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

And if you want to see what our kitchen cabinet hardware looks like installed, then take a look here.

Daisy finds cabinet hardware to be a pretty boring topic.

Daisy © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Buster enjoys hanging with the pack, whatever the activity is.

Buster © Rhiann Wynn-Nolet

Quince Cottage Style mixes old and new, rustic and opulent. 

Our goal is simple - make our new subdivision house look inviting, beautiful, and as though it wasn't born yesterday.