Thanksgiving turkey brie!

My sister is a genius. First of all, she made a delicious brie en croute (a wheel of brie cheese wrapped and baked in a sheet of puff pastry, served melty and delicious with crackers, bread and/or fingers :P) last year as an appetizer and it instantly became a required part of all future Thanksgiving meals. YUM!

Then this year, as she was plating her masterpiece, she realized it would be pretty easy to make the whole thing look like a turkey. Extra points for THEMATIC creativity!!! All it took was a few small pieces of roasted carrot, two cranberries and a little piece of cracker for his 'chin' (what on earth do they call that?!). Isn't it ADORABLE?!!! Almost too cute to eat, but it was so delicious, we managed to overcome that!

Oh the places you'll go...

I LOVE that Dr. Seuss book, one of my favorites :) And I LOVED this super easy pinterest project that I made my hubby for an anniversary gift. We don't usually buy each other gifts, instead we spend money on a weekend getaway together, but sometimes we make little things for each other. I had pinned this craft a while back, and it took less than an hour to complete.


I bought a few maps from Barnes and Noble, a heart punch, some scrapbook paper and a cheap from from Michaels, and got to work down in the laundry (where my crafting wouldn't be discovered :P)... I punched out the most memorable places we've been together, where we met, where we honeymooned, and other fun places, stuck them to the scrapbook paper in a grid using double-sided tape, and put it in the frame.

That easy!!! I have a few extra pieces of the same scrapbook paper, and since we hung it as part of the gallery wall in our office, I'm going to use the paper to mat a few other items I want to frame, for a more cohesive look. Pics to come, when it's done :)

Lovely lavender

You might remember when I went a little nuts and bought four bunches of dried lavender at Trader Joe's... I can't help it, I LOVE lavender, and it's gotten to that point in the summer where all my plants are requiring more frequent watering, and cut flowers hardly last more than a few days before wilting because it is TOO DARN HOT! So buying a bunch of dried lavender seemed the perfect solution for my little table centerpiece container that's been holding a languishing little lavender for a few months now. I kind of squished it into the little container, and that may or may not have caused the languishing... But dried lavender is already dead - so PERFECT solution! :) Well, the lavender didn't quite stand up the way I wanted them to, probably coz the vase has a wide opening, so I needed to get some floral foam to stabilize them a bit. I finally got around to it this weekend, and it took all of 15 minutes (aside from the lovely aisle browsing at Michael's!), so here's how I did it:

You will need:

Dried flowers (or silk if that's what you like)

Floral foam

A knife

To start, use a knife to cut the floral foam to size - you want it to fit snugly into the vase or container you will be using.

Next, lay out the dried flowers on your counter/table/workspace. Begin to add the flowers, a few stems at a time, cutting them to the height you'd like the arrangement to be, as you go. If some stems break, put them aside and save them in case you can use them at the end.

As you begin to fill the container, turn it every now and then, to make sure that the arrangement is full and balanced from all sides (especially important for me as I planned to use this as a table centerpiece. When you are almost done, shake the container a little, and fix any stems that fall or lean over. I was very happy with how my new table centerpiece turned out - it is fragrant, simple and doesn't wilt in the heat! And I ended up with an extra bunch of lavender left over, to give to a friend :)  

Epiphany!

Well, I've had an epiphany! It's funny how waking up in the same room, every day, you eventually get a sense for exactly what should go where... Our house has the feel of an art gallery or museum, with high ceilings and good light, something we both loved when we first saw it, but having tripled our space has given us much more room to decorate. So rather than banging holes in the walls over and over and moving things around by trial and error, we've been waiting for inspiration. I found the perfect mirror for our master bedroom dresser this weekend, we'll finally put up the things we've brought with us from our apartment now that I've decided where they'll go, and I'm going to get busy working on some of these amazing projects I found on Pinterest.

Aren't these just Pinspirational?! :)

DIY Velvet lamp shades

I woke up on Saturday morning to a spectacular squall! Gosh I love rainy days!! I really should live somewhere other than Southern California, where I could enjoy a few more rainy days a year! But anyway... I spent most of the day relaxing, lazing around the house, but by the afternoon I was ready for a craft project. I have been on the hunt for new lamp shades for our bedroom for a few months now, and bought same plain, off-white shades thinking I would get fancy and customize them :) I had some success a few months ago making my variation of this lamp shade for our living room:

So I have been on the lookout for the perfect fabric for covering my bedroom lamp shades - I knew I wanted something elegant, and something cozy, like velvet, but nothing more specific than that. While I've been trying to decide on a fabric, I had noticed that the plain shades seemed to let a yellowish light through, which I didn't love, so I decided to spray paint them black, to block some of the light. Looking at my spray painted shades, I realized that while I would NEVER have guessed it, what I really wanted was black velvet lamp shades. Since we've recently moved into a much bigger space from a tiny apartment (where our bedroom was one of two rooms in the 'house'), we kind of have a blank canvas to work with, so I feel like these black lamp shades will help guide our other decorating choices, from art to pillows to paint(eventually, one day) and I love them. Here's how I did it:

I started by finding my trusty glue gun (the hardest part of this project actually!) and cutting a piece of fabric a little larger than the lamp shade. Then I glued the fabric around the outside of the shade, working quickly and burning myself once in the process :S

Then I flipped the shade over and glued the fabric under the top and bottom edges, and trimmed the excess fabric. To give a more finished look, I trimmed the shades with black grosgrain ribbon.

Here's the finished product (please excuse our mess):

I love them - and every time I bump my tiny little blister and it hurts like crazy, I remind myself of these lovely shades :)

DIY art for Mr. & Mrs ~ AKA The Dylan Installment

The Dylan Installment :P And an abstract piece we both liked in the background

One of the things we both loved when we first saw our new house was the fact that it felt like an art gallery. Big white walls, high ceilings in several rooms, lots of natural light coming in through the giant glass block window next to the stairs, and just a general airy feeling that made us both excited to think about the possibilities. The thing is art is completely subjective, and one man's idea of something he'd like to hang the wall is likely to differ greatly from one woman's vision for the house in general. For example, when my hubby said he wanted to get a huge picture of Bob Dylan to put on the wall, I took a few deep breaths and started to think of a way to use his idea to make something that I would enjoy looking at every day. And then I had an epiphany. I love black and white photography, and I have an obsession with trios of things - not sure why, but this something we've noticed about me - trios and diagonals. But anyway... Then there's the matter of our budget. Since we're still working on paying off our appliances (which I am SO THANKFUL for, it actually doesn't bother me to pay the bill, I just make myself think of laundromats and how many Sunday afternoons of my life were spent there, and then I click 'Pay Now' with GLEE!!), and there are other things around the house we want or need to spend money on, we are trying to stick to a budget when it comes to art. And since our old apartment was only 500 square feet, we didn't bring a lot with us :) So I came up with a DIY budget art project that my wonderful hubby hung up last night. Here's what we did:

The poster I ordered online

First, I ordered a black and white Bob Dylan poster from here - it was about $3.00 plus shipping on Amazon. When the poster arrived (like a day later - the return mailing label showed they shipped it from less than a mile away - kinda funny), we rolled it out and decided on three small areas of the poster that we both liked and thought had interesting contrast and detail. Then we bought some simple, big frames and matting. We got these from Aaron Brothers (and kicked ourselves for missing their penny sale by two days - ugh!!), but Ikea is great for inexpensive frames too. Then I cut out and framed the three areas we'd selected and voila - beautiful, simple art for our empty wall, Bob Dylan like the hubby wanted, but a little more subtle. I took a few quick snaps of how our little weekend project turned out this morning:

The pics don't quite do it justice, and I need to upload a front on pic of all three together (there are still pencil lines on the wall from the very complicated process of hanging them - our house is crooked, we're ok with that, but it makes simple things like this tricky!), but it was such an easy, inexpensive way to create art for our walls that we both love :)