saturday night crafting.

don't be jealous, but i've been spending my saturday night partying it up. and by partying it up i of course mean crafting things centered around my dog.

i know you are jealous of my life right now. it's ok. i understand.

but really. for the longest time, i've been wanting to create silhouette portraits of myself, austin and the critters. and since i plan to add a whole collage of photos along our hallway walls, now is the perfect time to make the silhouettes.

i won't bore anyone with the process {there are a bazillion different ways to do it} but i just wanted to quickly share the result of the first one completed.

do you think it looks like miss juliet?

i do. and i think it's adorable. just like juliet. now to make the rest of them and get them all framed. and hang them {along with about 40 other pictures} along the hallways...

pinterest inspired.

you do know what pinterest is, right? {careful: you might get sucked in.}

so a while ago i found this pretty little idea on pinterest, originally from here.

and since our bed now has a big window right behind it, i needed something to cover the window, but regular old curtains weren't going to cut it. and i happened to have some really long white curtains from the guest room in the old house...

so i reused them to create this:

how fun is that?

and pretty long curtains for the second window, as well.

i also found inspiration for my nightstand on pinterest, originally from here.

a few trips to goodwill and now i have this:

the middle one is my favorite one. i'm considering painting the other two in some neutral shades, since they are the hard plastic kind of suitcase and i figure paint would stick to them pretty well. i also need to actually secure them all together somehow since i have a sneaky little cat who likes to climb on anything and everything he can, as evidenced here, before we moved. can you find him in this picture?

yeah. that's him on top of the cabinets. silly cat.

anyway. those are a few of the pinterest inspired things that have been going on around here. we've been working hard the last month, working on turning this house into a cozy little home.

and just for fun, a few sneak peeks of some other house-related happenings.

and our nice little neighbors, bryan and kara {or maybe brian and cara?} baked us some yummy welcome to the neighborhood cupcakes. how sweet is that?

and now i had better get to work. these shelves aren't going to build themselves!

nothing interesting.

i've got nothing interesting to write currently. except maybe that, as you could probably guess from my lack of posting, i am back in school for the semester. back to the same old same old: study, stress, test, and repeat. except we've started clinical rotations this semester. one day a week i'm at a nursing home/rehab facility in the pt department.

anyway. so i wanted to quickly give an update on how my goal setting and accomplishing went for the month of january. so here we go.

personal.
-get off my butt and start running again! i'm going to aim for at least two runs per week.
well, i started off great. and even ran more than two times per week. but then, i stopped. so i'm going to say i half accomplished this. just because i don't really want to write that i failed.

-keep up with creating our family yearbook, month by month.
done. but mainly because we didn't do anything in january to photograph. so, sure.

-make one {and only one!} crafty thing, perhaps something i find on pinterest?
yeah notsomuch. i attempted one crafty thing, but it didn't turn out. as in, started step one and instantly scrapped the whole idea. meh. but to be fair, there's some crazy things happening around our house right now, so it's probably better that i didn't try to make something for the house {hopefully more on this craziness later}.

home.
-put laundry away as soon as it's folded. it's really not that hard. i just hate doing it.
heck yeah i did. and i even got austin to do the same.

-stick to our newly created budget. eek.
a little pass. a little fail. we did really well with our weekly grocery budget, only went a little over on our "out to eat" budget, but keeping up with the entire budget was a little screwy, so i can't say we got it all right. again, some craziness happening.

-try at least two new recipes for dinner.
i already shared that we made {and i couldn't stop eating} baklava earlier this month. but that's not really "dinner." at least it shouldn't be. but we also made some broccoli and ricotta cannelloni. so i'm going to count that as two. i'm thinking we made something else new, but i honestly can't remember what it was. so just take my word for it.

so there you have it. nothing interesting, but information about my goals. if i get real inspired today or tomorrow i will come up with some february goals. no guarantees, though. so don't hold your breath.

weekend things.

so i told you we had lots of plans for the weekend. and i promised lots of pictures of said plans. well, i kinda failed. but whatev. i do what i want.

first, i need to give a little update on our beautiful pumpkins. so remember my awesome cat pumpkin and austin's creepy smiling pumpkin?

yeah. well a mere two days after we put them on the porch, things fell apart. my cat began caving in... and molding. yuck. this is what it looks like now, just a short week after carving it.

but austin's actually looks really funny. the creepy smile has now begun to cave in on itself, making the pumpkin look like a grandma pumpkin who has no teeth. it makes me laugh.

please note that even though they are both molding and collapsing, we still have them on the porch. my pumpkin even fell over on its back so you can't even see that it was carved, yet its still hanging out on the porch. oh well.

i also wanted to share that austin's pumpkin had a safe ride down to our house from the mountain. buckle up, for love, buckle up {i still sing this song all the time, mom}.

anyway, back to this weekend. saturday night we all went to austin's cousin's wedding up on signal mountain. the wedding was gorgeous and i absolutely loved the bride's dress. of course, i suck and got ze.ro. pictures of the bride, groom, ceremony or the reception or any of us at either of those. i did, however, force austin to take a picture with me once we got home before we both changed out of our fancy-schmancy clothes.

on sunday i attended a bridal shower for bride-to-be brianne. the set-up of all the food was picture perfect! bri's maid of honor, amy, did a great job of setting up everything.

and check out the pretty little framed monogram that amy {and her husband} put together for brianne! i absolutely love it and am adding it to my list of things to make. 

we all said we should take a picture and pin it on pinterest. but we were joking. because it would be silly to go out of our way to add something to pinterest just so we could pin it. i mean, at least kind of joking. cause i'm probably going to do it.

and now here's little miss bri herself opening some gifts.

amy included little recipe cards for us to share our favorite recipes with brianne. super cute!

we had a great time and i got to meet sarah's little boy for the first time. he's super cute and was so good hanging out with all us girls. and let's just be honest, we really spent most of the time gossiping just chatting and catching up with each other. oh and playing with the baby. bri's wedding is getting so close and i know we're all super excited and happy and anxious for her big day to get here!

so there, i kinda halfway came through on my promise of weekend pictures. but not really. what can you do?

and for anyone's who's wondering, why yes, my birthday is one week from today.

just saying.

quilting for beginners?

if you remember, quite a while a go i posted a to-do list of crafts i wanted to work on. one of those crafts, was a quilt like this:

and, ladies and gentlemen, i have begun working on my quilt! it's a pretty simple design, which is good since i've never made a quilt before and this helpful tutorial is making it even easier!

i started by cutting my fabrics {which austin helped me pick out} in to 3, 6 and 9 inch strips.

the inspiration quilt used black, green and ivory colored fabrics, but i decided to go with browns. it'll match our house better, i think.

after making all of the strips of the fabrics, i sewed them together end to end to get 90" wide strips, so the quilt will be about queen size. once the strips were to their mate, i sewed them all together in a layout i liked to get this beautiful piece of work.

you can see the seam running right down the middle of the quilt top. in order to make this a little less awkward, i put two "fake seams" {as i've been calling them} halfway between the center seam and each edge of the quilt top. and although i don't have a picture of that, you can just imagine four evenly spaced vertical sections, instead of just the big two vertical sections on this picture. does that make sense? meh. i don't know.

this is one of the fabrics that austin picked out. it was his favorite for some reason so i made sure there was a big 9" stripe of it.

and for some reason, austin {and the lady cutting the fabric for us at hobby lobby} thought this fabric was ridiculous and ugly. so it only gets one tiny little 3" section.

i don't know why everyone hates it so much! i mean, i think it looks a little like cauliflower or lettuce or something, but i still think it's pretty. oh well, less is more i suppose.

so that's my quilt top. i got some batting on sale at jo-ann's so now all i have to do is find the backing fabric that i want {on sale or clearance somewhere, this quilting stuff is expensive!} so i can sandwich the layers and get to quilting! i guess whenever that happens i'll be sure to share some pictures with you!

a table: finally finished!

it's friday again. and aren't you lucky? i've finally finished something!

finally, i finished painting our patio table to match the little side tables austin painted green last weekend. and boy, was it a lot of work. by far the hardest thing i've ever done. first, i had to deconstruct the whole table.

then i began to paint. my arm has never been so sore.

the hardest part, was reconstruction. it's always easy to take things apart, but ten times harder to put them back together, right? now, i could have made things a lot easier on myself by waiting for austin's help over the weekend, but no. i wanted to do this on my own. and besides, the neighbors saw me working on it, so i couldn't let them see the table beat me. but alas, after about two hours of cursing at the pieces patiently working step by step, the table finally came back together!

so here she is, in all her green glory, combined with our new patio chairs we got last weekend at home depot and the umbrella we grabbed at target {which conveniently match perfectly}.

i like the green table with the brown on the chairs. i didn't want a whole matchy-matchy set.

i even replaced the bolts with much better ones {ones that don't have to be removed twist by twist with a stupid pair of pliers. grrrr.}.

so there it is. we have a beautifully painted table, chairs, umbrella and side tables to enjoy many cookouts around this summer.

anyone want to come over?

weekend warriors.

since this was my first weekend off in a while, austin and i decided to try to get as much housework/gardening/errands done as we could. and, boy, did we.

first, saturday morning, we go up bright and early to go car shopping! very exciting.

first, we tried the nissan sentra {images from here}.

then, we tried out the new ford fusion {images from here}.

these cars are hi-tech, especially when compared to my dated-but-loved little mirage. we've got a few more cars to look at before we make any decisions. but we're just not sure how much longer my mitsubishi is going to hang in there {i've had her for almost 10 years!}. fingers crossed she holds on long enough!

after car driving, we got to work around the house. we had some outdoor tables that needed to be painted so i scrubbed them down {while austin mowed the grass}.

cleaned and ready for paint.

we chose this lovely dark green textured paint from rust-oleum {and i made austin buy me that hat if i was going to paint anything}.

but in actuality, austin did most of the painting.

while julie and i frolicked in the sunshine.

so here's the color and the texture we chose.

top surfaces done, drying in the sun.

and, we finally planted our garden!

juliet was there for moral support, of course.

we also got some awesome new chairs and a giant umbrella for our patio table. we also have plans to paint the patio table to bring the whole set together. hopefully i'll have pictures soon!

all in all, we had a very eventful weekend. but we've got big plans for the upcoming weekend, as well! i love having weekends off again!