Our First Original Painting

Today we purchased our first original piece of fine artwork — a painting  by my absolute favorite artist in New Orleans, Adam Hall. I shared his work before in this post a long time ago. Every month, we go to the Palmer Park Arts Market and look through his booth of paintings. I’ve wanted one for a long time, so I’m so excited to brighten our home with one of his colorful New Orleans works of art.

My older sister and her husband gave us money as a wedding gift and before it all got spent on wedding expenses, we wanted to put some of it aside to make sure we bought something as a wedding gift from them. I love art and Blair and her husband collect fine art, so we thought a painting would make the perfect wedding gift from them.

We missed the Arts Market last month (they switched the weekend because of Jazz Fest and we didn’t know), so we e-mailed Adam to see if he would be showing his paintings anywhere else in the next few weeks. He e-mailed us back and said he would be more than happy to bring some of his paintings over to our house for us to look at them. (How nice!) We told him the average size and price range that we were looking for and he brought over about 15 paintings that fit in that range. They were all so beautiful!! We spread them throughout the living room and foyer and quickly paired them down to our top favorites. I wish we could have bought more than one!

I forgot to snap a picture of them inside, but here they are about to be loaded back up into his car:

And for the one we chose, here it is:

Isn’t it gorgeous? The colors are amazing and I love the impressionistic quality. The scene is so pretty and cozy, I would love to be swinging on that porch swing! The title is “The Light Behind the Columns.”

I love the pop of colors it brings into our home and I love that it can be enjoyed from both the living room and the foyer. This picture makes it look small, but it is really 24×36 inches (2×3 feet). It will definitely be a family keepsake for us and is an amazing wedding present! (Thanks Bob & Blair!!)

Anyway, if you live in the New Orleans area, check out Adam Hall at the Palmer Park Arts Market, the last Saturday of every month in Palmer Park. If you aren’t from New Orleans, definitely check out his website or contact him about other paintings. He is a really nice guy and does absolutely amazing work.

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Foyer Curtains

Our foyer is probably the most decorating neglected room of any in our house. This is especially sad because it is the very first room you see and walk into when you come in our little home. I think the main reason we haven’t done much to it is because it functions for a lot of different things, so it is hard to get the right pieces and create the right balance in there. It functions as an entryway/mudroom, a dining room, and also as Drew’s office.

Here is all we had done to it so far:

This room is not so bad compared to how it looked for the first several months we lived here:

All last summer we just closed this room off from the rest of the house and didn’t use it. Then we put up the blinds, got our dining room table, refinished this lamp for in there, and put some plants in there. That was about it. The rest of the room was storage/piling place for things that didn’t have a place.

We are trying to change that and finally give this room some love. (Slowly, but surely!)

We thought the best way to spruce this room up was to add some patterned curtains to the windows. (the regular ones, not the arched ones) I looked for months for curtains online and at the few fabric stores that New Orleans has to find some pretty drapes or fabric to make some. New Orleans is severely lacking in the fabric department, so no luck there. I found some pretty options online, but a lot of them seemed expensive and many didn’t come with 96 inch length options.

Finally, for Valentine’s day we decided that instead of buying each other gifts, we would both go in together and buy something for our home. Foyer curtains seemed like the perfect thing that we had been needing, so we went with these:

These are these curtains from Pottery Barn Teen actually. When I was in middle school and high school I loved looking through the pb teen magazine at all the amazing kids/teen rooms. I hadn’t paid much attention to them in the past few years, but I’m glad I revisited their website to check out their curtain options! I love the geometric pattern of these!

Based on the pictures on the website, I expected them to be more like a printed heavyweight cotton. However, they are made of a much thicker fabric and the gray pattern is very textured and more like velvet. It was unexpected, but I like the more heavy lush quality of these. I really like the warm gray color as well (Although they have several other color options). For the curtain rod, we went with the same one we used in the living room, since the rooms are side by side and you can see them from both rooms.

They definitely add much needed softness and texture to the foyer. They make it look so much more home-y and put together already! (Putting away the bicycle and other storage in there also helped) Now we can move on to other updates in there! Next on the list is a better work/office area for Drew!

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Spring Planting

One of the first things that I did after we moved into our apartment last summer was plant the window box outside the kitchen window. I grew flowers and herbs in it all summer and then took the herbs out and moved them inside during the winter. Although, it never actually got all that cold here this winter, they possibly could have survived out there all year long. Anyway, I still have my basil growing in a small planter on the breakfast table in the kitchen, so I decided for now just to plant some colorful flowers in my window box this spring. We are thinking about adding another window box to the other kitchen window to put herbs in.

It has been warm here in New Orleans for a while now and today seemed like the perfect day to do a little planting. I just wish we had more of a yard to actually be able to plant more things! We’ve thought about building a raised garden bed in the front yard of our apartment to grow vegetables in, but aren’t sure if we want to spend the money building it for our temporary housing here. We might though. I’ll keep you posted if we do. For now, flowers will have to suffice.

Marigolds, Vinca, Petunias, and Dahlias. So colorful and pretty! Oh and how cute is my little watering can?! I picked that little guy up from the value aisle at Target the other day for $2.50. It is the perfect size for watering the window box and the other indoor plants I have. I love spring! 🙂

Any of you doing any planting lately? Enjoying the warmer weather?

Oh and in case you noticed, that is just paint all over my hands. I was mural painting this morning!

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Freezing Cookies

So this post might seem relatively obvious. However, this idea never occurred to me until I was in college.

When I was in high school, and I would bake cookies at my house, I would just make whatever the recipe called for, bake them all and put them in a cookie jar for everyone at home to eat. I had a pretty big family (3 sisters, 1 brother, my parents, all the friends that were constantly in and out, etc.), so within the week they would all be eaten.

However, when I moved away to college and I was in Drew’s tiny studio apartment baking cookies for just the two of us, it occurred to be that there was no way that we could eat (or needed to eat) an entire batch of cookies ourselves. I tried cutting recipes in half or into a fourth, but sometimes the math gets really hard with that, especially if the recipe only calls for 1 egg.

Over Christmas break my freshman year of college, I was at my older sister’s house and saw that she just made up her cookie dough and froze it into balls to pop in the oven whenever. What a genius idea! (Although, I’m sure many other people do this as well)

From then on, that is what I do when I get into baking moods. I make the entire batch of dough, then only cook a few cookies for the two of us to eat then. Then I simply freeze the rest in balls that can be baked whenever for freshly baked cookies anytime! (It’s like homemade easy-bake cookie dough!)

It is super simple. Just scoop your cookie dough out into balls onto a cookie sheet. Place them close together, but not touching.

Stick the cookies into the freezer on the sheet for a few hours, or until frozen solid. Once they are frozen, take them out of the freezer, pop them off the cookie sheet and place into a ziploc freezer bag.

Then take a Sharpie and label the bag with the type of cookie and the cooking instructions.

Then you can pop them back into your freezer to pull out and bake whenever you get a sweet craving, have unexpected guests over, etc. It is lovely to be able to have a couple homemade cookies fresh and warm without having to make a mess in the kitchen every time.

As you can see, I have several different kinds in my deep freezer:

The cookies in the demonstration above are Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies, recipe here.

Which of course are making my mouth water, but unfortunately I can’t eat right now since I gave up carbs for Lent. 🙁

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DIY Mason Jar Soap Dispenser

Say hello to our lovely new blue mason jar soap dispenser!

After making our DIY Liquid Soap, I decided that our kitchen could use a new soap dispenser to hold our soap in. Our old one was looking pretty raggedy.

Gross, right? I have no idea why the glass was getting all rusty. The whole top part had broken apart and was just all disgusting looking. I saved the actual dispenser pump part for my new soap dispenser, but threw out/recycled the rest of this old mess.

Instead I brought out this beauty. (and excuse the flour mess all over the counter. We had just made homemade tortillas. yum!)

The actual jar is an antique blue mason jar, but I used a newer lid, so I didn’t destroy anything antique. I think this lid was actually one from my sister’s canned tomatoes she gave us last summer.

For the soap dispenser part of this project, I just cleaned up and re-used the pump from my old soap dispenser. However, if you don’t have an old one to re-use, I’ve heard that you can find just the pump parts online or perhaps look at a thrift store for an old one you could re-purpose.

The opening I needed in my jar lid was roughly the size of a dime, so I used a dime to draw a circle on the lid of my jar.

Then Drew drilled a hole through the center of the marked circle.

Then he used sidecuts to cut the opening a little wider.

He used the drill bit again to slightly shave off the sharpest parts of the edges as well. It isn’t the prettiest opening, but it doesn’t really matter since this part gets covered up anyway. If you have a bigger round bit for your drill that would actually work better, but we didn’t, so we were making due with what we had.

Superglue your pump onto your mason jar lid, let it dry, then fill with soap and you are done!

One tip for the superglue process though: don’t let anyone do this step that isn’t a perfectionist. Drew did this step when I wasn’t supervising and approving and he somehow got superglue all over the top of the jar and it turns slightly white and is really noticeable. (as seen below) So make sure you are careful when you apply your superglue so that it doesn’t show in the end!

Other than that, it looks really great in our kitchen:

I love that the blue jar goes well with the blue colors in the print above the sink area. 🙂

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DIY Liquid Soap (from a bar of soap)

A couple weeks ago, Drew and I tried making our own liquid soap. It turned out really well! You can make a whole lot of liquid soap (almost two orange juice containers full!) out of any bar of soap! A much better deal for the money!

Here is what you need:

-cheese grater
-funnel
-2 Tablespoons liquid glycerin (found in the band-aid aisle) (may have to adjust this if using larger bar of soap)
-1 bar of soap (mine was 5 oz, but you can also use 8 oz)
-10 cups of water (16 cups if using 8 oz bar of soap)
-1 teaspoon vitamin E ointment (optional — I just added this because it is good for your skin)

Directions:

1. Grate your bar of soap.

2. Fill large pot with water, add soap shavings, add glycerin, and vitamin E.

3. Heat all ingredients until dissolved. It will basically just look like soapy water.

4. Let cool overnight, or at least 12 hours or so. Then you end up with this:

5. Then take a hand mixer (or an immersion blender would really work better) and mix it all up.

6. Use a funnel to pour into plastic storage containers. I used leftover Simply Orange and Simply Lemonade plastic jugs.

We’ve been using it for several weeks now and I really like it. I love the smell of the Dr. Bronners Citrus Orange bar soap we used! The consistency turned out just right and it is a lot of soap for the price of one bar of soap!

I’d like to try this for body wash next! 🙂

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Living Room Gallery Wall

After showing you my crocheted blanket the other day on the couch in our living room, it reminded me that I never posted about our living room gallery wall that I finished right before school started again at the end of the summer. Even though in that post I didn’t show any pictures that showed the gallery frames, the living room actually looks more like this:

Excuse the messiness, i.e. Drew’s flip-flops, airplane wings, the broom that I’m pretty sure he used to sweep the outside sidewalk and then brought back inside and set in the living room, etc. Lets focus on the frames.

Anyway, obviously the wall up above the couch looked quite bare beforehand, as shown here:

I really liked the idea of doing a gallery wall with several 8×10 or so pictures in each matching frame.  I really liked this print collection from Little Brown Pen (the same place that I got my Rose Window Print) but the collection is $150 and that is without frames. I didn’t really want to spend that much and I wanted the photographs to be a little more personal anyway. New Orleans is famous for architecture, so I figured what better way to highlight pretty architectural elements from New Orleans than in our living room?

First, I wanted to look into frames to see how much they were going to cost. We have an 11×14 white frame matted to an 8×10 in our bedroom that I like that was $18 at Target. (It came with the frame and mat together and looks similar to this one, in white). I thought those would look nice in the living room, but also kind-of pricey for several frames. (around $150 just in frames for the wall)

While out and about running errands one day, we decided to stop in at Michael’s and see what they had. Low and behold, they happened to have white 10×13 frames matted down to 8x10s. They were a tiny bit smaller than what I had originally wanted and the frames weren’t as sleek, but they were also on sale. I can’t remember how much they were originally, but they were on sale for $4.99 and they had enough in stock for the 8 or 10 that we wanted for the wall. Since that would get us right around $50 for all the frames for the wall instead of $150 like the ones at Target, we jumped on it.

We ended up getting 10 since we weren’t really sure of the arrangement yet and how many would look best. At that price, we didn’t want to not get enough and have to come back and get more after the sale had ended. We got to the check out and actually ended up getting an additional discount since the cart we picked had a coupon laying in it.

All in all, we got each frame for $3.74 + tax. Our total for all ten frames? $40.67. Pretty good shopping day.

I used some newsprint to cut out squares the size of our frames and taped them to the wall until I liked the positioning. Then we marked the nail holes right on the paper and nailed through them, taking the paper down after we had the nails for the frames up. Here are really bad pictures of that process. It was nighttime and dark outside. I should have turned the overhead light on for better pictures, but oh well.

I made the terrible decision to complete this project in the middle of the New Orleans summer, which meant that then I had to spend hours walking around the Garden District taking pictures of houses and fences in 100+ degree weather. That wasn’t perhaps the most enjoyable part of the process, but it did result in some pretty pictures. I took a ton, then narrowed it down to my favorites and then decided which 8 looked best together. I printed them each as an 8×10 at Sam’s Club. (They have the cheapest, quick printing prices)

After cleaning the frames and putting the pictures inside, I was left with this:

I do like the result–especially for under $50. I do slightly wish that the frames were a little bigger, but I can always switch them out later if I find another good deal. Eventually, I want to change some of the pictures and include more of the unique, colorful New Orleans architecture like shotgun houses and blue front porches as well.

Here are the shots I ended up choosing for the frames:

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Inspiration * Layered Curtains

Do you ever have one of those days where you see one little thing and all of a sudden you want to paint/draw/sew/knit/crochet/bake/redecorate, etc? Yeah, well that is totally me on a daily basis. I love being inspired by things and surrounded by pretty things that encourage me to be creative. Today, my inspiration comes from this picture I stumbled upon on Pinterest:

Isn’t it absolutely gorgeous! I love pretty much everything about the room in this picture, but I especially LOVE those curtains! Why did it never occur to me to layer lovely fabrics together to create stunning window treatments!? (especially amazing colors and patterns such as those seen here!) If you know me well, you know I love fabric! I love the texture, the patterns, the colors, the softness it adds to a room. So why should you limit yourself by only choosing one fabric to add loveliness to the windows in a room?

I can’t wait to add multiple layers of beautiful fabric patterns to the windows in my house! 🙂

image found here. 

 

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Crocheted Blanket Finished!

When I shared my crocheted blanket with you a couple weeks ago, it looked like this:

It was 8×12 squares and about 3×5 feet. Now, it looks like this:

It is now 12×14 squares and roughly 5 1/2 x 6 feet. I’m so happy to have it finished and have all the little threads woven in. (That part took forever!) The final blanket is really big actually. It fits all the way across our three cushioned couch. Drew and I can easily sit at different ends of the couch and still both cover up with it.

I really love the addition of the border! It makes it so much prettier! It also helped to align and pull the squares more evenly and straighten them out. The border also adds a nice ripple/lace effect. My mom and I used the same soft white color as I had used around the colored circles on the row of double crochets in the border, then switched to a cream color for the row of single crochets in the border, then went back to the soft white for the chain stitch loops on the edge of the border. I love the slight variation in the colors there.

So pretty! Now I need to get some different pillows and artwork for our living room to balance out this beautiful pop of color! 🙂

I love having pieces in our home that have so much love woven into them! This blanket is not only pretty, but sentimental as well, considering my mom and I both worked on it so hard for weeks over break, watching movies and television shows in front of the fireplace in my childhood home. I’m happy it now gets to live in my New Orleans home and remind me of those memories.

For more information on how I made this blanket, check out the original post with directions, here. 🙂

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Crocheted Blanket

I hope you all had wonderful holidays! I definitely have been busy the past few weeks! Visiting with family, taking my nieces to get pictures taken with Santa, shopping with my sisters for Christmas presents, baking cookies with my mom (these are my favorite holiday cookies!), celebrating Hanukkah and remembering our Savior’s Jewish roots, celebrating Christmas and remembering the night of our dear Savior’s birth, giving gifts, relaxing and wedding planning as well!

A while ago, I stumbled across this picture on the internet and decided that I wanted to start crocheting a blanket like this one over my Christmas break:

My friend, Tonya, and I used to knit and crochet all the time in middle school. We made tons of scarves and baby blankets, but I hadn’t ever made a large blanket like this. Luckily, my mom is super crafty and knows how to do all kinds of sewing things, so she refreshed my memory on my crochet stitches and read the pattern for me and showed me how to do it. It is really easy once you get the hang of it!

I ended up going to Walmart the day before Christmas Eve and bought 18 colors of yarn to work with. I seriously left the store with three huge bags full of yarn. ($50 worth!) I ended up wrapping them up for a Christmas present to me from my parents (they usually have us pick out things we want, wrap them and open them on Christmas) and then on Christmas Eve when we opened gifts, I looked like this:

My mom and I both started working on it that night and have been crocheting constantly for the past few days and have a pretty much finished blanket already!

We made lots and lots of circles before we started connecting them together.

We also tried to make sure that no two circles were alike so we spent a lot of time comparing the ones we were working on with the ones already done. We tried to make sure that we made the same number of centers out of each color and the same with the middle rows and outsides so that all colors would be well represented in the end.

It was harder than you would think to try to determine what circles to put next to each other to balance out the blanket!

We aren’t completely done, I still want to add a few more rows to make it a little bigger, and I have to go back in and thread in the tails of yarn, but so far we have this: (it is roughly 3×5 feet)

I think this blanket would also be really pretty made a little smaller for a baby blanket. It would also be pretty in a different color scheme as well.

I love the way the colors look together and I love the shapes. They look like little flowers. I also love the little star design that is made in the connecting corners between the colors (in the white part).

These are the colors of yarn that I used. The large white one on top is the connecting color. As you can see, the blanket is in the background, so this is how much yarn I had leftover after making a blanket this big. I still plan on making it bigger, so in the end I’ll use more of each kind than shown here, but you could easily make more than one blanket out of the yarn  bought for this project. I bought two of the super jumbo white one on top and we used all of one and a little bit of the one pictured here.

To make it, I used these directions, with a size H crochet needle. That blog also shows pictures that might be helpful if you haven’t crocheted much before. To sum up her words, this is pretty much how you do it:

ch = chain, st = stitch, ss = slip stitch, dc = double crochet.

Start: make 5 ch, join with ss into a ring.

1st round: 4ch (=1dc,1ch), 1dc + 1ch 11 times. Join with ss in 3rd ch. 12 dc.

2nd round: Start in one of the ch spaces. 3 ch (= 1dc), 1dc, 1ch, *2dc, 1ch* in the remaining ch spaces. Join with ss in 3rd ch. 12 groups of 2 dc.

3rd round: Start in one of the ch spaces. 3 ch (= 1dc), 2dc in ch space, 1ch, *3dc, 1ch* in the remaining ch spaces. Join with ss in 3rd ch. 12 groups of 3 dc.

4th round: Start in one of the ch spaces. 4ch (= 1 tr), 1tr, 3ch, 2tr, (=1st corner), *1ch, (2dc,1ch,2dc) in next ch space, 1ch, (2dc,1ch,2dc) in next ch space, 1ch, (2tr, 3ch, 2tr) (=2nd corner)**, repeat * to ** 2 times, 1ch, (2dc, 1ch, 2dc) inthe next two ch spaces, 1ch. Join with ss to 4th ch.

I used the assembly line method so I made a lot of circles before I started the 4th round and then joined them like this:

Start in a corner. Crochet 2tr, 1ch,next ch through the corner of the other square, 1ch, 2tr. (The first corner is done). Side: 1ch,(2dc, 1ch through 1ch on other square, 2dc), 1ch (2dc, 1ch through 1ch on other square, 2dc), 1ch. Next corner (where you will join square to the square to the right and the one above): 2tr, 1ch, 1ch through corner of square to the right, 1 ch through corner of the square above, 2 tr. Do the next side as the first. In the next corner you crochet 1 ch through the corner of the square above. Finish the round as in pattern.

Final Border:  One row of dc first. On dc in every dc and one dc in every ch space. 5 dc in the corners. One row of sc in every dc of last round. make one extra sc in the corners. One row of loops: Start with one sc, chain 4, skip two sc on last round – all the way round.

Here, is some more info on the lady’s blanket who wrote the directions above and more info on what the final border looks like. She calls her blanket, “Flowers in the Snow.”

Happy Crocheting! 🙂

P.S. My mom and I were both crocheting pretty fast the whole time, have previous experience crocheting, and we seriously worked on it all day long and late into the night almost every day over the past few days, so unless you have unlimited amounts of time to give to it all at once, I wouldn’t expect to finish yours so quickly! I thought it would take me months to do when I first decided to do it. I can’t believe we got so much done already! 🙂

*****UPDATE*****

See the blanket completely done in this post, here. 

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