A fresh Bliss List has been well overdue and in true fashion we are sharing 6 of our favourites this week! In the Bliss List series we share our favourites of the week, wether it be recipes, fashion finds or articles we’ve enjoyed. We took a little break as mom life got extra busy over the last couple of months but we are looking forward to getting back into the groove of these weekly round ups and we hope you enjoy them!
Gal Meets Glam, the beautiful fashion label founded by blogger Julia Engel launched their first Holiday Collection and boy is it full of stunning pieces! I was so excited for the opportunity to feature one of the dresses for the Holiday launch and couldn’t wait to share it with all of you today, I picked the Jessica dress with the oh-so sweet bows on the shoulders. Bows are always a lovely detail n’est-ce pas? The dress fits beautifully and hugs in all of the right places, yet it isn’t toooooo sexy. It has a nice classic silhouette with a very modest length that I love and the off the shoulder is still so on trend, did I mention that it’s so comfy? The material has a perfect amount of stretch (perfect for those holiday gatherings of over indulging). You can find the Jessica dress {here} and I’ve linked to a few others that I love from the Holiday Collection below, you can also follow along on social with the hashtag #gmgonme to see how others have styled these beautiful dresses.
Have you put up your Christmas tree yet? We started decorating ours this week after some major inspiration from Randi Garrett Design. Randi has such great taste, she actually has the same La Cornue range as us but in the stainless steel and brass – it’s stunning, have a look at her Kitchen Tour when you click over to her website. I promise you a rabbit hole of goodness!
Her Christmas trees are always exceptional, magical looking. Our local nursery here where I pick up most of our house plants also decorates their trees in a similar way every year, in all different themes and different colours – but all made with love and definetely “extra”. You can tell a lot of thought and time were put into decorating these trees and I am always in awe of them, every year I tell myself “next year I am going to do a tree like that!”.
I am usually quite minimalist with our Christmas Trees but I’ve always wanted to go glam, to go big and over the top – I’ve just never made the time I guess. Usually around this time of year work gets out of control busy but this year I promised Craig I wasn’t taking on very many holiday campaigns and would be taking most of December off. So far I’ve stayed true to my promise so we have had a lot more enjoyment in the decorating process. I picked up a bunch of new additions to our tree decor line up and I am mixing with things we’ve gathered over the years and I can’t wait to re-invent Randi’s tree in our own way.
She put together a great video for anyone wanting to learn how to decorate a Christmas tree like she does and I’m adding it below for you to watch, so helpful and I know you will get sucked in like I did.
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Christmas music is officially pouring through every room of the home, well every room with built-in speakers we installed haha! Craig and his best friend set up this amazing sound system through the entire home when we renovated so we have speakers in the largest washroom, the dining room, living room and kitchen and the study (my office). I have to say that it’s so fun when we pick some music and have it flowing through the home! It was never on my priority list to get this system done when we were renovating and I was honestly annoyed sometimes at how focused Craig was on making it perfect, which I can’t explain since I am such a music nut. But, here I am using it daily and SO thankful he made it happen. I still pull out the classic vinyl of course though, I mean nostalgia is in full force this time of year! What is your favourite Christmas music? I am a sucker for some Frank Sinatra and I just added the John Legend Christmas record to my album collection.
Holiday baking is also in full effect around here. We’ve also started planning our DIY gifts for friends and family, those made with love gifts that fill your bellies and your heart! The kids love getting involved in the kitchen as you guys know and this year with them being a little bit older, they are even more involved from planning to prep and packaging things up. We have so many fun baking activities planned with some new kitchen tools we found on Etsy that we can’t wait to share with you!
Today I wanted to share these gorgeous plaid cookies made by my friend Lucy over at the blog Craftberry Bush. I’ve shared her creativity here on the blog many times and when I saw her plaid cookies she made this year I HAD to share them with all of you! Lucy is so talented right? The kids and I are hoping to try these out this year so wish us luck!
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SO many of you have been wanting to see more of our porch swing since our exterior renovation reveal with Home Depot Canada! I am so happy with the feedback from all of you, it’s truly one of my favourite features of the exterior…thank gosh Craig built it right!?! I’m pretty excited to decorate our front porch for the holidays this year but we won’t be revealing it for a couple of weeks, if you haven’t had a chance to check out the exterior renovation of the front of our home check it out in the episode above, our click {here} for the full blog post with before & after photos. We’d love to know what you think of the transformation!
I love sharing my beauty product finds with all of you! Last month Yves Saint Lauren sent me their newTouche Éclat Color Correcting Blur Primer, I’ve been using it for 2 weeks and I’m IN LOVE. I was honestly doubtful when I saw the bottle of pink gel, how could something pink like this perfect my skin before the rest of my makeup? You guys know I only really use tinted moisturizers but on shoot days I’ve been trying to use foundation because it works so much better for photographs and video footage. Primers are a must for me if I am wearing foundations because my skin is naturally so dry. Now with this cold weather already here my skin is even more dry and in need of extra help when prepping for a full face of makeup. It’s called their Touche Éclat Perfecting Blur Primer – this one is pink and meant to fight dullness on all skin types. This primer comes in 3 different colours and all serve a different purpose. This product was sent to me as a gift but sharing this is not sponsored, I just genuinely am enjoying the product and wanted to share it with you! You can find all 3 colours {here} online.
What it does:
Touche Éclat Color Correcting Blur Primer preps skin for foundation while creating a smooth, refined appearance: pores seem to look minimized, skin texture feels smoother, and skin tone appears more even. It’s enriched with four nourishing oils—corn oil, apricot kernel oil, passiflora oil, and rice bran oil—to leave skin feeling incredibly soft without a greasy residue.
Thanks for hanging out with us this week for the Bliss List, we hope you come by next week too!
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