Merry Christmas, Darlings

I can honestly say that I've never had a better Christmas than this one. Evan and I spent so much time with family and got to see my wonderful nephews and little niece for so many days! 

You know me, though. It wouldn't be Christmas without me going a little overboard! 

Christmas presents remind me of bunnies...they seem to multiply when you're not looking!

First of all, if any of you have small children who just LOVE to help pass out packages, this is probably the best thing ever! Normally, we use tags and write people's names on their packages...but this year, I wanted to make it a little easier for the boys to pass things out. Since neither one of them can really read yet, I decided to use pictures! Also, since we had to transport all of our packages from Atlanta to Augusta with a nosy puppy in the back who LOVES eating ribbons, we needed something that was flat. Hence, the birth of my most brilliant idea so far: Face Labels! I printed out their faces on round labels and stuck them in the middle of our craft paper and washi tape packages. They were a huge hit with the boys (and my dad...he thought they were very cool. Thanks for thinking everything I do is awesome, dad!) as they sat there and said "Dat's ME! Oh Dat's Mama! Hey, Dat's BWODY!" 

A little dark, but they were having so much fun!

It was so much fun! :) 

Most of the presents I bought this year seemed to be alcohol-related...corksicles for my sister and aunt to keep their wine perfectly chilled, this gorgeous print of a photo-realistic Ketel One bottle watercolor for my dad, recycled wine bottle cheese plates for my cousins...and, for my brother-in-law, this:

Merry Booze-mas to Adam!

Yes, that's right. It's a Christmas tree made out of mini alcohol bottles. For the past few years, I've gotten Adam the newest Crown Royal flavors. This year, they came out with Crown Royal Maple. It's pretty damn good. But rather than just get him one bottle, I decided to make life hard on myself and make it into a Christmas tree! Yay! Great idea...

Seriously, go out and try this...it's good.

Basically, it's a styrafoam cone wrapped in washi tape stuck with mini bottles hot-glued onto skewers. I added the ornaments afterwards because I needed it to look a little more festive.  In retrospect, I would have gotten more minis...I was too tired to deal with it by the time I realized I needed more. 

I think he was ok with it though! :) 

For my last little art project, I decided to make the boys matching superhero capes! :) They turned out really well, I think. 

Want to know more on how I made these?
I'll post a how-to some other time!

I needle-felted the arm bands, masks and emblems before I heat bonded them to the satin fabric. My mom ended up going back over the velcro bits with the sewing machine because I had used iron-on velcro and, apparently, that is not strong enough to withstand these little guys. 

Brave Brody!

Loyal Luke!

I also made Cali a matching one so they could all play together! :) 

Courageous Cali!

And then I got bored on my day off and made this...

I really hate doing laundry...so I procrastinate. Sue me. 

All in all, this was an amazing Christmas! Evan and I feel as though we've been caught in a tornado (which we might actually be if this crazy weather doesn't clear up...tornadoes on Christmas...not cool, earth. Noooooot cool.) of family, friends, food and fun, but we wouldn't have it any other way! 

On behalf of our little family and our first married Christmas, we'd like to wish everyone we know (and those of you we don't) a safe and happy holiday season! 

Christmas Eve photos on the steps of the Old Cotton Mill in Augusta

May visions of sugarplums (or liver treats, if you're Cali) dance in your heads for many nights to come! 

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

I need a hobby...

That's totally a lie. I have so many hobbies that sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about which one I want to do. However, I did just pick up a new one: Needlefelting.

What is Needlefelting? It's basically stabbing a ball of wool with a little needle with barbs on the end until the wool fibers are interwoven into a hard-ish mass. What can you make in this fashion? Lots of things!

I started with tiny versions of my furry babies:

I didn't quite get the one of Mercedes finished before she went to her new home, but I'm glad I have it now. These will be going on our Christmas tree shortly!

Reunited and it feels so good!

I'm pretty happy with the detail I got into the back of Merce.
Her stripes were one of my favorite things about her!

I also created a pillow for my boss for her birthday. We had seen a pillow a while back that said "Tonight" on one side and "Not Tonight" on the other. 

She joked that she would buy it if it said "Not Tonight" on both sides. So that's what we gave her! :) 

Thanks to my lovely assistant, Lisa, at work. Here she is modeling our pillow...

And here's the second side!  

I did the sides all kinds of wrong, but they ended up pretty cool!

I cut out the letters from a wool felt sheet and
placed them on the other sheet before needling them together.

The sides of the pillow pre assembly.

Just so you have an idea, this is what I used to create everything: 

The green thing is the needle tool. It's spring-loaded.
Much easier than the single needle tool I used for Cali and Merce! 

Make sure you have a pad or foam block or brush of some sort. Otherwise you'll stab yourself repeatedly. Which I might have done. 

I literally put my blood, sweat and tears into each of these projects! 

Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down...

Unless I have them off! Yay for a relaxing day off work to clean the apartment, do the laundry and...

Who are we kidding? I did nothing of the sort. 

For the vast majority of the day, I did absolutely nothing. I literally sat on my butt on the couch watching hours upon hours of "Dance Moms." I love this show. I am not ashamed. 

During this time, I felt I needed something to occupy my hands, so I set to work untangling the mess of yarn that had been created when we left a certain puppy at home alone for *gasp* 4 hours. 

"But mom...I swear I didn't do it!!!"

(side note: I'm nowhere near done with this task and am seriously considering chucking it and going to buy some more.)

This is what 4 hours of unwinding a giant yarn mess gets you.
I decided to use the water bottle since it was so clear that I would need both hands to tackle this task.

(additional side note: Teaching oneself to crochet using YouTube videos and online tutorials is not working out for me. I will be needing assistance. Please help.)

Around 2:30, I decided that Cali and I needed to go for a walk. So we walked down to the leasing office, took our friends some cupcakes (that I had made the night before in a fit of baking euphoria...) and chatted for a while. But Cali was stinky so we made it short. 

Then we came home, made the bed, cleaned up the kitchen and watched more "Dance Moms." Then I started to feel a little sad that I hadn't gotten to eat one of my cupcakes. Last night and this morning, I had no desire to eat them, yet now, after they had all been devoured, I was consumed with regret. This always happens though. 

With applesauce in them, it's almost like eating fruit, right?
I'm gonna say yes. 

So what do I do? Start looking up fall cookies. I was planning on following my Apple Spice Cupcakes (see above picture) with some sort of pumpkin dessert. But nothing was striking my fancy. So I widened my search to sweet potato and marshmallow desserts. I mean, what is more fall than sweet potato casserole? But, alas I was not so impressed. Ok. Skip the fall themed flavors all together. Marshmallow cookies. 

Jackpot!! Browned butter dark chocolate and marshmallow cookies. It was as if Heaven was sent to me in cookie form. 

When Evan got home, we ate dinner and went to the store to pick up a couple of things I was lacking, specifically, the marshmallows and dark chocolate. Pretty essential stuff, I'd say.

I came home and got to work. I did change the recipe a little bit. Since I was making enough to take to my marketing meeting in the morning and for Evan to take to work, I doubled everything. But then I also halved the browned butter because the taste is so strong. I also used half whole wheat flour and half all purpose flour. Not to be healthy. Just out of convenience. Then I added a splash of vanilla extract because cookies just don't seem the same without it. 

7 dozen cookie balls. Oh these are going to be trouble!

All in all, this was a great experience! This was much thicker dough than I had expected, but it was SO YUMMY!

If you bake at all and don't have one of these stackable cooling racks, you're insane!
I absolutely love these things!

Evan gave them his seal of approval! (I had a picture for this, but SOMEONE won't let me use it. He claims he looked horrible but refused to take any more pictures. Lame.)

As always, there are some cookies that come out looking perfect and others that are just plain butt-ugly. Guess what? Butt-ugly tastes just as good as pretty and you don't feel half as guilty about eating them. 

The difference is clear. The taste, however, is the same.
Nicely done, Butt-Ugly cookie. 

The best part is that there are plenty for me to keep here in case I change my mind about trying them! Yum yum yum!

If you build it, they will come!

Have I ever mentioned that my husband is pretty awesome? No? Well, here's a whole post on how amazing Evan is.

I love our dining room now!

When we moved into our new apartment, it was decided that I could decorate the guest room in the girliest of manners and he could have the dining room for his "man cave." I got straight to work painting the guest room wall a lovely shade of pale purple and decorating with my favorite books, old pointe shoes and sewing/craft supplies.

The dining room was stagnant for a while. Then we got the donated chairs and table I posted about here. And then we stalled again.

We had a lot going on. We were quite busy! Helping friends move, baking extravagant cakes, working really hard, helping friends get married, trying to catch up on sleep, holding babies...we are exhausted! But does that stop this girl from wanting to have her apartment all put together? Nope. I'm a little ambitious. (Let's hope Evan thinks of it that way!)

We originally discussed Evan mounting his TV in the dining room and connecting his computer system so he could play video games and be really awesome and manly in there. But he lost the power cord to his TV and, truthfully, I wasn't that sad. So then we were faced with what to do in there. I don't know if many of you know this, but Evan is a Home Brewer. He brews beer. It is tasty. He's currently going back to school to get a few credits so that he can apply to UC Davis to get his Masters in Brewing. Yeah. That's a thing. My husband is pretty damn cool.

While being cool is awesome, brewing comes with a lot of equipment. Most of that equipment is not really the aesthetic I was striving for in our grown-up apartment, but I know that Evan needs to have fairly easy access to it and thus it could not reside in the storage closet off the patio that is roughly large enough for a small cat and one medium-sized box of books. Don't ask how I know this. My cat is not good.

Our solution? Let's build a bar back to hide all of his things and provide a surface for us to put out Evan's rare beer bottle collection! I thought it would be particularly cool to paint the entire wall behind it with chalkboard paint so that I could make the dining room feel a little like Evan's very own brewery. Except we're going to have to call it a "brewing company" because I have a very hard time saying words that include one "r" followed too closely by another. This is why, growing up, I always called my friend Greer, Gweer. Brewery automatically turns into Brewewy or Bruurry.

I digress.

A few weeks ago, I came home from work and Evan had already painted the chalkboard wall! Score one for ambition! I could hardly wait to start working on it. Lord knows I love Pinterest...so I found some inspiration for my chalkboard wall. Here's the progress on that...

Love shots like these. Nothing attractive at all...

Shameless self-plug on Evan's wall. What?
My cookies and cakes are delicious. 

See what I mean? Beer stuff isn't super pretty. 

Messy but fun! :) 

Partially done. Getting better. 

After that, we kinda stalled again. When Evan and I are on the ball, we're very productive. But then we take a little while to finish. It's like we have bursts of energy and inspiration and then we go into creative hibernation for a while.

So nothing really happened on the bar back until the weekend before my sister's baby shower. Which is when we needed it done. Oops. Good thing Evan works fast! :)

He went out, bought lumber, borrowed a router, jigsaw and saw horses from our friend Ben, and got to work! He knocked that thing out in 2 days! And then he stained it, to boot!! Awesome hubs award!

I woke up to the smell of lumber in the morning!  

Cali was not happy she couldn't help!

We had originally wanted to put cabinet doors on the front and we may revisit that at some point, but we were short on time and cash and those things are EXPENSIVE. So our alternate solution was to put up a curtain of sorts with industrial strength velcro and plain cotton duck cloth. My mom handled sewing the edging and measuring things. Thanks, Mom! :)

Close-up of how we made it work! 

About one hour before the baby shower was supposed to start, I finally got the fabric up and put the finishing touches on the bar itself. :)

I had to display the glasses mom bought Evan from the New Glarus Brewery! :) 

You know you wanna tap that...

Every bar needs some good art...Dad found this watercolor picture at an arts festival.
It may be one of my favorite things ever! Ketel One and Crown? Thank you!
Oh. I also love the colorful straws. :) 

After all this work, we are so excited to enjoy this room now. Unfortunately, we're both too tired. Excuse us while we sleep for a week!

One Man's Trash...

Is our awesome new dining room!!! I know it's been a hot minute since I blogged last, but we've been extremely busy. You know, the Olympics have been going on. Now, we don't have cable, but I've been super pumped about it at work and I've been spending a lot of time decorating there. I'll be sure to upload pics of that later. 

But, while I've been extremely busy at work, Evan and I have also been really busy at home! See, we have this really awesome friend, Genesis, whose dad had this awesome table. I had seen this thing on Pinterest...

Check out the AWESOME Blog this came from

So I decided I wanted to replicate it. But I couldn't find the same stencil. Or anything close to it. But I also wasn't willing to wait for something I ordered online to come in. Ever get that bug in your butt about finishing a project IMMEDIATELY? That's me every single time I get an idea...

Anyway, I went to Michael's and found a Martha Stewart stencil. And then I stared at it...and tried to figure out how I wanted to lay it all out. And I stared at it for over an hour...

And then I decided I might want to sand it before I got a headache from trying to figure out how to lay everything out. Cali decided to help. By licking the sandpaper. Have I mentioned that she's not very bright?

And then I started to paint. And that took forever. I mean, like...FOREVER. Evan actually went out, had drinks with his friend, Jeff, and came home before I was even close to being done.

Now, Ashley from Domestic Imperfection stained over her paisley table. Since our table had been previously stained or treated or something, I decided that I was just going to varnish over ours. I have yet to do this. I got too impatient and wanted to put it all back together. And use it. I'll get to it eventually.

But I did manage to paint the legs and the bottom lip of the table.

Evan did varnish them while I was at work. It took forever for them to dry. But the table looks really great!

After that was done, I really wanted to use the table...but we had no chairs. But THEN, Gen's awesome mom had these chairs she didn't want anymore! So I gladly took them off her hands! 

Now...they didn't exactly match our decor. And they had a nice layer of dirt on them. So I scrubbed them clean and took the covers off the pads. Mercedes was VERY happy with the "lilypads" we had sitting in the living room for a few days. 

We had friends coming over for dinner last night and I had a day off...so naturally, I repainted them and recovered them. It was a really busy day! 

Now, Gen's mom only had 5 of these chairs. We really need a 6th one. If you happen to have this EXACT SAME chair, please message me! I know the chances are slim, but it would really be great! 

Here's the finished product...our dining room is really coming together! 

And this adorable bird cupcake dish is courtesy of my amazing mother-in-law!
Red velvet cupcakes courtesy of me. :) 

Once we get the bar built in the back, we'll be all set! Can't wait to show everyone the finished product!!

Oh, and here is our newly-built Cali area. I love having all of her stuff in one place!

I promise she has more toys than this...she just doesn't put them away. Ever. 

Thanks to Ben and Phyllis for her adorable Georgia bowls! We all love them!