A Very Merry Unbirthday to You!

Well, I guess you can't really call this an "Unbirthday," but it definitely wasn't a birthday party. Then again, it wasn't a baby shower either.

I have been wanting to make an "Ombre" cake since I first saw it on Pinterest!
So happy with the way it turned out!

You see, this is my sister's third child, but it's her first little girl. I guess you could call what we had a "Baby Sprinkle." These are all the rage now. Since Brooke had lots of little boy stuff but nothing for a little girl, we thought it would be fun to have a super girly tea party so we could "sprinkle" her with love and goodies for her newest addition!

These were so much fun to create! I am glad I had canvases on hand! :) 

I feel like our apartment just works really well for a "Mad Hatter" Tea Party. 

Mom, the flowers were PERFECT!
(and by the way, Evan does not want them to die! He keeps watering them!)

This type of party embodies everything I love about little girls. We had tea sets all around, pink and green decorations, flowers everywhere, tiny tea sandwiches, cupcakes and a VERY pink cake!

AND I GOT TO BUY GIRL CLOTHES!

Ok. Slight confession here: Evan bought the clothes. I was so busy the week leading up to the sprinkle that I didn't have time to go by and pick up what I wanted to get my new little niece, Lila Brynn. I didn't go before this week because I knew Carter's was about to start their massive baby sale! I just love that place. Anyway, the morning of the shower, as I was putting the finishing touches on the bar back, Evan went to Carter's. Alone. And he picked out the cutest darn things ever. We are so in trouble if we ever end up having girls. 

This is my favorite thing Evan picked up! 

Brooke's friends got her some of the cutest things too!! :)

Monograms are so cute!

Almost too cute to use!

Precious little dresses! Girls are so much fun!

Mom found the pink chenille horse at the Yellow Daisy Festival!
It was made from old bedspreads! How neat!

While he was running errands for me, I was cleaning, organizing and decorating. My absolute best friend in the world (and I'm not just saying that so she'll come over and clean again, but I also would never refuse her if she offered that!!), Genesis, came over a little early to help. My mom also showed up and brought all the yummy goodies she and my Aunt Holly had prepared. We had yummy fruit salad, pasta salad, cucumber sandwiches and the tastiest punch I've ever had! I could never have gotten everything done in time if it hadn't been for them!

I used the fabric for Lila Brynn's nursery as my inspiration for the invites!

Mom did SUCH a great job with these banners!
I am wondering if I can use them again...

Brooke LOVES pasta salad! Mom and Holly made the yummiest I've ever had!

Confession: I did not make these. Evan bought them.
Sometimes convenience trumps creativity! 

Genesis made the lemon squares and I made the cake (of course!) and we had such a lovely set-up. We were so happy to have all Brooke's close friends and the ladies of the family!

I didn't make these either. That goes out to Gen! 

Ashley, our cousin-in-law, had her very own Lyla just 3 weeks ago.
She looks pretty amazing already! Way to set the bar WAY too high, Ashley.
(note: I will NOT look this good that early...sorry, babe.)

My best friend, my awesome sister and probably the world's best Aunt!
I am so lucky to have such wonderful women in my life!

You've always got to have an "eating" shot. This is proof they enjoyed themselves!

As always, I couldn't have done all of this without you, Gen!

The beautiful guest of honor! You do NOT look 8 months along!!

I won't bore you with all of the nitty gritty details! If you want details, I'll give them to you! Thank you to everyone who helped and I loved celebrating this exciting new addition to our family! :) 

Again, I must say, I cannot believe you are 8 months along.
P.S. Mom and Holly made this awesome headpiece for Brooke to wear at the shower
and for Lila Brynn to wear when she plays dress up! Sweet!

Lila Brynn, we cannot wait to meet you! 

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!

Celebrating Marriage!

While it's a little early to celebrate our marriage just yet (I mean, we haven't even been married for 6 months...), I was so excited when my boss asked me to help plan her in-laws' 40th wedding anniversary! 

It's so reassuring to see people who are still in love with each other after being married for so long! I can only hope that we will be just as happy in 39 years and 7.5 months! 

My boss and I scoured Pinterest for some amazing ideas and then put our own spin on things. I helped her create a wreath for their front door, a chalkboard sign and a fantastic cake. I won't go into much detail about the wreath and sign, but I'll explain the cake a bit more below. Enjoy these pictures in the meantime!

I have to say, I had SO much fun making this cake!

The boss didn't want anyone to bump into it, so she put it in the corner. 

It's not perfect, but I did it pretty quickly...on my lunch break. 

This actually turned out WAY cuter than I thought it would!

Ok, so this cake was a first for me. I had never worked with gumpaste before. It was SO much fun!!! I had such a ball! Oh, and the silly puppy did too. In fact, she decided to eat some of the leftovers...that was a fun digestive experience for her. 

I digress. I tinted the gumpaste, rolled it out, used a handy dandy cookie cutter and used these marvelous flower forming cups. 

You can find these at Michaels. They are super helpful!

Sounds easy enough, right? Well, I didn't have quite enough of the cups, so we improvised...with wine glasses. Wish I had a picture of this, but I was too busy to remember to document the process.

The centers of the flowers were crystal beads we found at Michaels. I threaded wire through the holes and twisted until I had little sticks. Obviously, these weren't edible. No word on whether anyone tried them, though.

I alternated between pink and white layers, different sizes and let them "set up" a little differently for each layer. Once they were kinda set up, I assembled them and stuck my crystal/wire stem through them. I wanted them all to hang naturally, but I hadn't thought to purchase one of these: 

So I had to improvise. I twisted the head of a wire hanger (Mommy Dearest flashbacks, anyone?) and let them hang from the fireplace overnight. Clearly I closed the door to the bedroom so no curious kitties or precocious pups would try to taste them. 

As for the cake itself, I basically doctored up a vanilla cake mix by adding a box of vanilla instant pudding and changing the liquid measurements a tad. Don't remember exactly what I did though so will try to find that recipe later. Promise! Scout's Honor! (Haha...but I wasn't a scout so you can't hold me to it!)

As with all icing emergencies, I defer to the person I consider to be the baking guru...Whisk Kid. I followed her directions for Italian Meringue Buttercream. Almost perfectly. Except I'm not perfect and I'm very impatient and this lack of patience and perfection caused me to have to wait a while for things to look as good as hers. Don't be like me. Follow the directions. And don't use boxed egg whites. They just don't work as well. 

Oh, and I also decided to flavor my icing with a little Amaretto. Just to make it interesting. Icing it was a royal pain. I wanted to make it as smooth as possible, so I kept sticking it back in the freezer and then smoothing it out with a paper towel. I know this sounds silly, but it really helped a lot! 

Anywho...after everything was said and done and perfect enough, I stuck the flowers in and, well, you see the final result...and apparently it tasted pretty good too! Success!! 

Happy 40th Anniversary to the Jones'. And yes, that's actually their name, not some pseudonym! 

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!