10 Years!

Yep. You read that right.  I have not blogged in almost 10 years. So much has happened. Writing it all down would take a SOLID 9 months to do if I made it my full-time job, but alas for you distant followers of this blog, or even the wayward soul who stumbles on this electronic outlet of mine...there will be no full recap.

    Buuuuuuttttt...(Yep, I'm leaving it spelled like that) I will give you some quick highlights:

• Hubby and I have been married over 15 years now! It's been a blast! 

        I must also tell you that we don't always wear hats.  It just seems like we seem to always have hats/head coverings on when I take our picture.  

    We have 4 kids now...FOUR!

• 1 boy and 3 girls. Don't feel bad for the boy for being the only one...

He. is. spoiled.

These kids are hands down my favorite inventions.

Thanks to Savanah Merrill for our pictures

You can check her out on Instagram @smerrill.photography

• We've moved twice.
• Almost moved for work at least 4 times but felt that we needed to stay right where we are.
• Gone places, seen things, laughed, cried, slept, not slept, ate, created...just tried to be better people in general. 

So that's 10 years in a nutshell...actually, probably something even smaller than that...like the husk of a piece of rice. Yeah, let's all start saying that instead.

 "That's me in a rice husk!"

Why am I back, just out of the BLUE? You're probably thinking "10 years of nothing and now here you come crawling back after you left us with not even saying goodbye? Adios? Auf Wiedersehen? Sayōnara?

I'm sorry. I missed you too.

Homemade Flower Power

Do you have fabric scraps lying around? In case you do, grab your needle and thread and make a fabric flower. I started out with a strip of fabric about 1x16 inch piece of fabric but I have also worked with wider and longer pieces of fabric, which also turn out to be pretty cute. Just remember the longer the piece, the more layers of pedals... the wider your fabric the taller your flower will be.

I started with my piece of fabric and surged all the sides. You probably don't have to use a serger but I LOOOOOVE my serger so I use it every chance I get. In fact, I am trying to think of another project right now so that I can use it again. (It's actually my mom's and she is allowing me to become addicted to all its possibilites before she takes it back.)

A non serged edge will allow more fraying. You may want to do some type of stitch along the edges to prevent the whole piece of fabric from falling apart. I would suggest a zig zag stitch.
Next, start hand sewing along the bottom and then pull the whole thing tight. (I hope this makes sense.)
So when it is all pulled tight it should look a little like this.
Next, wind the bottom edge around itself and form a flower. Ta Da!!
Now you can do whatever you want with this little beauty...glue it to a hair clip, attach it to a head band, put it as a bow on a present, get into a fabric flower throwing fight with your 2 year old...the possibilites are endless!

What am I thinking?!?

My husband and I are expecting a little girl in November and I am back in the crafty spirit. Yes, I am nesting! I tried not to do it but I can't help myself. I am on my sewing machine or at the craft store almost 2 hours a day! It's disgusting I know!


Well here is my latest and most difficult sewing project. I made a rag quilt for my son before he was born but now I am going for the big she-bang of quilts. Let me just show you what I am doing.

First I went to the fabric store with some already collected fabric scraps from my collection and ended up with 9 different prints...that's right...9 different prints are going into this quilt and that does NOT include the trim or the backing...really, what am I thinking?!? I took those 9 prints and cut them into 4 inch squares. Here they are layed out the way I will sew them together. First I sewed them into strips...

And then into blocks. I will end up with 24 blocks that measure 10 1/2 inches. I am still not done sewing all the squares together into blocks but I will be soon. (Fingers crossed).
Once I have the blocks finished, I will then cut them into 4ths. Now you are thinking "What is she thinking?" Yeah I am starting to ask what I got myself into!!!

This little guy is the one who keeps me sane and tears me away from my sewing machine to play cars or trains. Thanks Bubba!

New Family Room

Well the downstairs family room is now livable and we love it! We still need to add some accessories and molding, curtains, blinds, a mini fridge, etc., but as of right now we are enjoying it. Our little boy loves it the most I think.
We LOVE our sectional because it is 5 different pieces. We can arrange it in any way we want. This picture was taken and then we moved it into its current U shape.

If you are wondering about colors they are both Benjamin Moore. The dark brown is Middlebury Brown, which we call "chocolate pudding" and the beige is Bleeker Beige.

What should I do?

I would like to finish our downstairs family room but don't know what to do! So I am in need of some help! I want to be able to switch up the color scheme without having to buy new furniture. Like this picture: I do not know what color to paint the walls basically. I am a little tired of beige land but I also don't want to go too crazy with color so that I get sick of my walls by the end of the summer.

I need color schemes ladies! Here is our room...no I do NOT want to keep the walls red.


Here is the couch that we have decided on (2 pictures same sectional):



I am really liking apple greens right now, like this pillow from Ballard Designs

I am also digging the aqua blues like in these pictures:
But then I will look at something like this:
and love it immediately! Something about grays affects me to the core. I think they are so nice and cool but I don't think a chocolate brown couch would look the best next to a gray wall. I may just have to use the gray in my master bedroom one day, like this:

If any of you have ideas or pictures that you wouldn't mind shooting my way, it would be very much appreciated!

Where is Candace Olsen from Divine Design when I need her?!

New Pillow Cases

I finally decided that it was time to get rid of the BLAH look of our couch pillows. The pillows came with our couches and I have never really taken a liking to them. So I decided to make some pillow slipcovers. Now I could have just bought new pillows but I have been on a sewing kick lately so I thought I'd sew some up. I found a great and easy removable pillow case tutorial Here over at Sparkle Power. So here are my pillows Before

And here they are After

I found the fabric super cheap at Joann's because they only had about 2 yards left of each fabric. I love them! Right away, my Hubby said that he really liked him...phew...that means they are keepers.
Here is the back. I love that I finally found a tutorial for a removable pillow cover. Now I can wash the pillow cases whenever they get dirty AND change them out when I no longer enjoy the red. But for now I am in love. One day I will have a large stash of these pillow cases so that I can change them out to fit my mood.
P.S. If you look really closely, you can see how anxious I was to sew these covers because I used the black thread I had on hand instead of waiting to buy brown.

Mirror Makeover

Look at this...uh...not-quite-a-beauty of a mirror. I found her at my local second-hand store named Desert Industries. Well, she's not quite beautiful yet but she has a lot of potential. It has pink plastic laminate on the front and grey laminate on the outer edge with a little fake gold leafing on the inside that is flaking off ever so nicely.

It really doesn't look so bad in these pictures but it sure was not very pretty.

Here's the backside.

Enough of the "before" pictures, let's get onto the redo! Here are the supplies I used: Mod Podge and brush, Lacey Scrapbook Paper about 3 12x12 sheets, scissors, black spray paint, and screw driver.

First, I removed all the fake gold leafing from the edges.

It came off pretty easily, which was a bonus but then it revealed the blah grey edge.

This next part is where the fun comes in. I took the Lacey Scrapbook Paper and measured out how exactly I wanted it to be placed. The picture above is of my first section. I was able to get about 3 sections placed per I sheet of 12x12 scrapbook paper. (Did you get all of that?) AS you can see there are some spots where the paper hangs over and other places where the paper is missing-like the upper right corner of the piece that I just put on.

First I slapped the Mod Podge onto the frame, put the already cut out piece of paper on, and then put another coat of Mod Podge. I did the same thing around all the front of the mirror.

You can see that I am almost done. I'm sorry for not taking pictures of how I bridged the gaps between the sections of paper. My bad!

For those gaps I just trimmed some curly-q's off of my excess and placed them neatly where I felt there was too large of a gap. I had to keep reminding the perfectionist in me that minor gaps wouldn't be noticed once I spray painted the whole thing.

Here she is with all the Lacey Paper in place. It may look cute in the picture with the black paper on the pink, but again, it was not as pretty in person as it looks in the picture. You might be able to tell where the sections come together if you look close. Do you see how I just added extra swirls of paper to make it less gappy (that may not be a word).

Here she is in all her spray painted glory. You can't see all the detail until you get up close to it or catch it in a certain light, which is what I was going for.

I didn't want it to have a completely plain front.

Here you can see some more of the detail. I am very happy with the results and I think it looks great in my bedroom. You could also spray it down with magnetic spray paint before you paint it the color you want. Then you could add cute colorful magnets.

If you wanted to do something like this, go right ahead just link me to your pictures so that I can see how it turns out.

Please give credit where credit is due if/when you do this project.