Embroidery Hoop Art Part 1

For the longest time I have been wanting to make some artwork for Anna’s room. Being that it will be the last room renovated this fall (after the attic and babies nursery) anything that goes on the walls will be up for a while. Also being that we’ll be nearing our deadline, if not past it, by the time we get to Anna’s room I will have very little if any time to create artwork for her then so I say bring on the hoops!

I really want to add a bit of a vintage vibe in Anna’s room to tone down the brink pink/coral that the walls will end up as previewed here so I thought embroidery hoops would be the perfect way to create this. Luckily I had a few embroidery hoops already on hand from the thrift store in my previous town however I was in great despair when I went to the 2 thrift shops in my new town and they had zero!!! I’m going to have to make a trip back home to visit the grandparents and stock up on embroidery hoops! For now I was able to create about 5 different kinds of hoops and I’ll share the rest when I get them and am finally able to hang them!

For some reason I decided to tackle the hardest hoop first….

This particular hoop took me about 2 or 3 hours to make…I lost track of time haha. For an experienced embroiderest (Is that a real word?) I am sure it would take much less time but I was just figuring out what I wanted. I also found burlap is very annoying to embroider on due to the large holes in the fabric that can often squish together more then you like shortening your stitches! I also used a back stitch for the font and later learned I should have used a stem stitch, oops.

Here is a really nice video showing how to do the back stitch and this video shows how to do the stem stich.

Having not learned my lesson with burlap I then decided to attempt to tackle some yellow burlap which I wanted to embroider some cheerful felt balloons on….sadly my embroidery hoop was very thin and this particular burlap was extremely thick and as such disaster struck!

Mealplan 02.26.12

So I ended up finding a really amazing blog, The Girl Who Ate Everything, whom has become a wonderful source of inspiration for meal plans! She has some really great recipes including appetizers, breads,  main entrees, desserts, and even holiday meals. This week I'll be featuring two of her recipes in my meal plan, the Chicken Gyros and Broccoli Cheese Soup.

Monday

Chicken Gyros with Greek Salad

Tuesday

Broccoli Cheese Soup

Wednesday

Fried Chicken with Yam Cubes

Thursday

Tortellini with Alfredo Sauce

Friday

Ribs with Baked Beans and Salad

Recipes:

Chicken Gyros: I am absolutely obsessed with Opa! and greek food, sadly the closest Opa! is about 4 hours away from where I live so I don't get to eat there often. I am really excited to try this recipe and see how closely it simulates the flavours! I'll be serving this with a greek salad.

Image found here.

System Failure Egads!

So I had a beautiful meal plan post written out for all of you guys and this afternoon I went to edit one small thing then post it up and BAM suddenly it all disappeared and stupid Blogger saved the changes right away and I couldn't get it back! Wahhh all that hard work, sigh. :(

As such tomorrow during Anna's nap I will try to get up at least a quick revised version for you guys with all the meals and links to the recipes but it won't be too glamorous as I will be very busy creating a project to reveal to you Tuesday night for Mini Manor's 1% Art Pinspiration link party here!

I hope to see several of you there and again my apologies!

My Little Scientist

Sometimes it can be really hard to come up with activities to do with a toddler, specifically a 17 month old. Not to mention their attention span is rather short so nothing lasts for a long time. As such I am always on the look out for fun new ideas.

The latest activity I came up with to entertain my toddler involved water, food colouring, and cornstarch. I placed cornstarch with a little bit of water in one bowl for a squishy texture and just plain water in another bowl. I then provided my daughter with some scoops and spoons for experimenting. I sat on the sidelines and just let her do her thing but would occasionally add a drop or 2 of various colours of food colouring into the water or cornstarch for her to experiment with.

By the end everything was a gross colour and things were rather wet (you might want to strip your kid down for this rather than just rolling up their sleeves.) But all in all we managed to pass a good 45 minutes by with some awesome exploratory fun!

Check out that look of utmost concentration!

So proud of her concoction hehe.

What kinds of fun activities do you like doing with your toddler? Feel free to share! I'd love more ideas!!!

Valentine's Day!

I've been bad, real bad. You know when life seems to sweep in like a whirlwind and you feel you don't even have a moment to collect your thoughts? Ya it's been that kind of a weekend and my blog got ignored as a result, I'm really, really sorry. Between purchasing a new car, finding and sealing the deal on daycare, and being swamped with practicum work in order to seal the deal on my new job, life has been an utmost flurry. I'm hoping things will settle down soon, but regardless, I'm going to try to get my butt in gear and get on top of everything.

I know Valentine's day is somewhat old news but I would love to share with everyone how we spent our day, or actually 2 days...the day before Valentine's day required a fair bit of prep work haha. I had decided I wanted to treat Charles to a waffle breakfast, but being that he wakes up at 5am I did not want to have to make waffles that early in the morning, so I made them the day before for him to enjoy that morning. I also made some little apple pies the day before to sneak into his lunch as a treat!

These were the signs I made to go with the apple pies, and another I snuck into his container of nuts.

The apple pies turned out really delicious and make for a great compact snack actually!

The day of Valentine's day Anna and I woke up as usual and enjoyed some delicious waffles ourselves. We then spent the morning relaxing before heading off to our baby group for some socializing and a delicious lunch. Our baby group actually had a door prize that day of a bouquet of lilies which I won! It's been amazing, for the past week every time we come home the first smell that greets us is the fresh lilies. They are such a potent flower. Not everyone likes their smell but Charles and I think it's delightful and we actually want to start buying a stem or two every few weeks to keep the house smelling pretty.

After lunch I went to the grocery store to pick up some goodies for dinner. We had steaks, baked potatoes and dill carrots. For dessert we ended up having this recipe from Censational Girl for molten chocolate cakes with fresh blackberries, they were soooo good.

Sorry for the bad picture quality, it was just snapped with my cell phone, forgot to take a picture of the dinner too.

At the start of dinner we exchanged our cards and had a good laugh over how similar our cards were for each other. After our delicious meal over dessert we started opening up the little notes from each other that we had written each day from February 1st as described in this post. We took turns reading them out loud.

Some of my notes for Charles included things like:
"I love how hard you work for us regardless of the weather."
"I love you for how goofy we can be together!"
"I love how you do the laundry so I don't have to go down into the scary basement"
"I love you because I can't picture life without you."

And some of Charles notes for me included:
"I love how you are always at the door to greet me when I get home!"
"I absolutely love the look of your puppy dog eyes."
"I love how we can be so open with each other and talk about pretty well everything."
"I just love you right to the bone and deeper. You are my everything!"

After dinner we cleaned up the kitchen and then just relaxed on the couch for the rest of the evening. All in all it was a great simple but special way to spend the day. Did any of you celebrate Valentine's Day? Feel free to tell me how you spent the day or what you had to eat! :D

In Love...But There's Wasps Nests???

Dun dun dun dunnn! I present to you.....the attic!! I have completely fallen for this space, it just oozes potential and charm. Both Charles and I didn't want to come down. Besides the millions of wasp nests, and having to be careful of where you step so your foot doesn't go through the ceiling, I declare our attic heaven. I really can't wait to start renovating it and turn it into our master bedroom!

This view of the attic is facing our back yard. There is a little vent there right now which we'll end up taking out, enlarging the hole, and making a small window. The reason it has to be a small window is that there is actually an additional roof line just a few feet below the vent, due to an extension that was put on the house quite a while ago.

The reason for the arrows in the picture is because we're wanting to put up a pony wall, most likely somewhere around where the beams are that the arrows are pointing to. This would equal out to a height of just under 3 feet.

Here you can see the extended roof while peeking through the vent to give you an idea of what I was talking about.

This is a picture of the same side of the attic, however with Charles standing there you can see that the peak of the roof it is indeed a decent height and it can give you some perspective on sizing of the space. We figure once we're finished the peak should be about 7 feet high. The width will be around 15 feet. Also I forgot to note that this will be the side of the attic that we'll be placing our bed and hopefully some bedside tables. Plus you can see we have a quaint little chimney poking up through our space. :D

Mealplan 02.12.12

Here we are at another week! Valentine's Day is just around the corner for Tuesday! Who is excited? Does anyone have any elaborate plans? We'll just be having a nice dinner at home and reading the love notes from our jars from this post with each other. Simple but delightful.

Speaking of dinner here is what we have planned for the week.

Monday

Spicy Chicken Fettuccine

Tuesday

Steak, Baked Potatoes, & Dill Carrots

Wednesday

Meatballs & Rice in a Mushroom Cream Sauce

Thursday:

Pasta Fagioli Soup

Friday:

Tacos

Recipes:

A little more Valentine cheer!

Hi everyone! I'm here to share with you all the tutorial for my canvas subway art from last week's Valentine Love Note Countdown post found here, along with a super quick wreath you can make up in time for the holiday! No glue is even required!

Here is a picture of the subway art canvas to refresh your memory.

The supplies for this were simple: mod podge (although I think regular white glue could have sufficed), a paint brush, your choice of ribbon, and your subway art. I got this art as a free printable from here. Since I don't have a printer atm I simply took my usb drive to the local print shop and got my art printed out to the size of my canvas (8 x 10) for $1.30. They printed it out for me on a paper slightly thicker and glossier than normal paper.

Mealplan 02.05.12

I hope you all had a fabulous week of recipes last week! I know I sure did! Some of the recipes did scare me I won't lie but they turned out better than I expected!

The butternut squash soup was amazingly delicious, really rich and creamy and very filling too! I almost chickened out on the Thai Peanut Noodle Stir Fry (peanut butter in cooking scares me, it can go sooo wrong) but I am so glad I went through with it! It was AMAZING! The blend of flavours was just so good we couldn't stop eating it haha. It would have been really good as well with those skinny stirfry noodles vs actual spaghetti noodles.

Luckily I've discovered I can incorporate meat back into my diet again (hurray!) as most of my stomach pains have passed. I do find if I overeat, or go too long without eating and then eat really fast, or eat alot of junk food I still get them, but they are much more few and far between! What a relief :D I like being able to enjoy my food hehe.

I'm also still really vulnerable to my cravings, you just have to say a word which can relate to a food and there will be a good chance that I'll suddenly be craving it lol. Charles was changing Anna's diaper the other night and said "oooh look at this slushy diaper" and I was just like "mmmm slurpee". Ya it was a real gross co-relation, but yes, I went out and got myself a slurpee. It's bad I tell you, real bad. Luckily most of my cravings are for healthier things, like blueberries, strawberries, lasagna, perogies....mmmm. Food is my weakness at the moment hahaha.

Monday

Spaghetti

Tuesday

Stir-Fry

Wednesday

Perogies with alfredo sauce and bacon

Thursday

Chicken with rice, broccoli and carrots

Friday

Greek style hamburgers

Recipes:

How do I love thee? Let me count thy ways!

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 
 My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 
 For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. 
 I love thee to the level of everyday's 
 Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. 
 I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;  
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. 
 I love thee with a passion put to use 
 In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 
 I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath, 
 Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,  
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Love, I think it's something we don't always fully appreciate or take time to let the other person really know about. So this Valentine's day Charles and I decided to undertake the task of writing 14 notes to each other, 1 a day starting from February 1st until Valentine's day.

These notes will typically include a way that we love the other person, but you could also put favourite little quotes, inside jokes, or an actual note to the other person. On Valentine's day we'll sit down together and read the notes. This is a new tradition we just started this year that I hope to continue every year!

Of course I had to put my own spin on this project and create a beautiful little display for our jars to hold the notes and just to celebrate Valentine's day in general. I have included a tutorial below as to how to create the tinted mason jars, and in a later post I'll share with you how I created the sign and a Valentine's day wreath that I quickly threw together!

For the mason jars I initially followed this tutorial however I found it was lacking in several areas so I'll be sharing a few more details here with you.