Catching up

It seems like I just barely have time to catch up on the weekends from the busy work week, lately.  I haven't taken so many 'outside' pictures, or 'action' shots. I DID finally finish my cross stitch that was for my friend's birthday (in late February). It was a litttttttle bit late [and by that, I mean extremely] because I am much slower at cross stitching than I thought I was.  

The Mr. has joined a softball league through his work, so he's been having practice once a week. His first game is tommorrow - I haven't seen them play, yet, so I'll be interested to see how they do.  I, on the other hand, have been having allergies like crazy so I haven't spent hours on end outside like I'd want to! I'm not sure why they're so bad this spring, but my guess is that it has to do with the mild winter.

On another note, we did a spice haul a couple weeks ago, and I snapped this pic right after I opened the shipping box. 

Online, we ordered rosemary, allspice, tamarind, coriander, cloves, basil, grains of paradise, chipotle powder, oregano, cinnamon, spearmint, and chili powder. I'll need to figure out where the spices will live since every brand and jar seems to be shaped just a little bit differently !!

What else have we been up to.......? Last weekend we helped with 'Adopt a highway' trash pickup. I was surprised to find out how much paperwork we had to go through just to help out. There were three or four pages of forms to sign and training to go through. We also wore hard hats and bright vests, just to look extra cool out there with our trash bags and trash pickers. It was a good time, and I was glad the weather was nice enough that we could help out.   I'll be volunteering more often fairly soon - just more paperwork to complete for that!

Hopefully I'll be posting more often - I'll try to remember at least. I like posting recipes that we cook during the week, so maybe I'll try to do that more often. No promises! This afternoon, I'll be making these maple syrup cookies, so I'll have to report back on how those go. I might even use the vanilla sugar I made... (which is also delicious!)

I hope everyone's been having a good week - and having a relaxing weekend, too!

I made curtains!

I made some curtains. They are lovely and are a nice addition to the mostly white room. They look crazy and bright, but they soften up quite a bit when the sun is shining through them.

They aren't the same length because I bought of the sheer fabric was what was left of the kind I liked at the fabric store, but I'm okay with that. I'd probably be ok with just the opaque layer of curtains, but there's some rule at the apartment complex about not having any color besides white in the window, or something like that.

I'm not a pro at sewing by any means, but I managed to string these together. They are lovely enough for me! :)

New wheels, winning crepes, and free shipping

The whole time I've had Happily Going, I thought I was showing my pictures as big as Blogger would allow. It turns out, my pictures were practically tiny. I apologize, and am excited to have larger pictures now, without ruining the bloggy format. Three things on the agenda:

#1: The past few weeks we have busy with the car business of selling and buying, and here is our new purchase!  It's a blue Prius and I really like driving it- it's very smooth on the road and has a much tighter turning radius than I'm used to. The Mr. loves watching the fuel economy. We are exciting like that.

#2: I n-e-v-e-r win raffles or drawings, so I was super excited when I checked my e-mail this morning and found that I won a gift certificate to a restaurant! The restaurant is called Ravenous and they make some pretty fantastic crepes and pommes frittes (Belgian French fries). The last time we were there, the Mr. had the Blueberry Zeppelin (blueberries) and I had the French Kiss (chocolate-hazlenut). Their other specialty is pommes frittes which we chose to eat with aioli and a horseradish sauce. YUM!!

#3: We, at The Crafty Bees, are offering FREE SHIPPING on all card orders to US and Canada until December 1st!! Just enter coupon code FREE11 at checkout.Just look at all that awesome, crafty goodness!

Does anyone have any suggestions for which kind of crepe I should try next? You can find Ravenous' menu here. I hope everyone is having a great start to their Thanksgiving week!

Three Pillows!

I've been really busy and meaning to post the pictures of the pillows I've made so far! I have three done, and three more to go.  They're fun to make, and I like sifting through my own ideas to make them unique.

Here's a picture of my first pillow. (It even has it's own blog post, here!)

second pillow- with a bow! (I think it would be cute to wrap a present like this.)

detail of the second pillow (my camera doesn't seem to like working in macro...)

third pillow

 detail of the third pillow (notice that the purple looks nothing like it "actually" should, but I don't have time to mess with color editing right now)

 Three happy pillows, hanging out on the yellow chair!  

Thanks to my mom being able to fix the sewing machine while my parents were visiting, I was able to finish the third pillow. It had been out of commission for longer than I had liked, and was starting to get worried it wouldn't get finished! THANKS MOM!

I also figured out that an envelope back(which I did on the second and third pillows) was much less time consuming than the "other" way I managed to close the first pillows. Good thing I learn fast!

I'm also linking up with the Earth Wonders Photo Challenge! This week's theme is 'clouds'. 

Do you see the foot shaped cloud? 

Next week I have a pharmacology exam- this weekend I must study, study, study. Hope everyone's hanging in there this week- it's almost Friday!!

Holy snow buckets!

Yesterday we got dumped on with 2-3 inches of snow, and by now, it has all pretty much melted!  We have both the cars all geared up for snow, but thankfully I think this was just a sporadic storm.  Winter will have to wait just a little bit longer!!

In other news, I've spent awhile trying to get a few crafts made for the etsy store.  Here is a link to the store, and this is a picture of the first star ornament I've posted.

I think it's pretty cute, if I do say so myself! If I can get myself to work on a single project at once, rather than three at a time, I think I'll get a whole lot more done! Hope everyone's doing well, and avoiding the snow!!

Autumn Wreath & Tidbits of Wisdom

It's been quite awhile since I've been on here! I leave for a bit, and it turns to autumn. sheesh, the seasons change while I'm gone!!

The past week has been pretty busy. Oh, also, I can pass on a few tidbits of wisdom that I've accumulated:

• When cutting a males hair with an electric razor, be fully awake. Make sure an appropriate length attachment is on the razor. Otherwise, it will result in buzzing all the hair off if attachments are forgotten. 
• If you break a wall clock and all the glass falls out, don't wait to vacuum it up. Also, smashing the glass out with a hammer results in a fully functional clock, however: *disclaimer*- I am not advocating it and don't get hurt and blame it on me!!
• Hot air balloons need practically clear skies to fly, like Z-E-R-O fog.  More details on this later. get excited, but not too excited.
• If doctors ask awkward questions, they get awkward answers. Not totally sure what else can be expected here. 

I also got my craft on this weekend by making my dad a present. It involved paper. and Michaels. {Not boy-Michaels, but Michaels 'the craft store' for anyone who is unsure.}While at Michaels, I also bought stuff to make a wreath since the door feels neglected.

 Pre-made wreaths were ~ $40, and way less cool than what I wanted. We even found this little guy. He needed a home.

The finished product!

And our friend can guard the door. Guess what he'll say????

Go on...guess!

He'll say....

Whooooooooooo's there???

Pillow #1

I recently bought fabric and pillow forms to make pillows, since I figured the living room could use something new. Most of Friday was spent trying to figure out how to get the sewing machine threaded.  Once I figured that out, the thread kept bunching up on the bottom. So, I'm pretty surprised that I finished it this weekend. It didn't take too long once I sat down to do it.

Here are the four fabrics I'll use- there will be 6 pillows in total.  The hues look kind of weird on my computer screen, though. I kind of sketched out what I was going for... and then pretty much just eyeballed it.  I would have run into less problems if I were "fancy" and used a "measuring tape".  You can see that I recorded dimensions, but I pretty much just ignored those and started cutting. 

The Mr. thought he was being sneaky and took a picture of me sewing. I must have not noticed him. You can see that I'm wearing awesome slippers with my awesome headband/ponytail.  This is why I do not generally write about fashion. :P

Here's a close-up of the blue ruffle that I put on. I think it could look a whole lot better, but the Mr. was nice and complimented it.

Here is the finished product.  I definitely need to learn a better way of stitching the last part closed, once the pillow is stuffed inside. I'm mostly happy with it...1 down, 5 to go!

Other than pillow-making, the Mr. and I went out to eat Saturday and had a pretty relaxing Sunday. It rained all of Saturday and all of Sunday, so we only spent a little time outside. And the weirdest part about the weekend? We saw a clown entering the apartment clubhouse as we were leaving the gym Saturday- I didn't know really what to say. It was awkward.  There must have been a kid's birthday party going on, or something like that.

Happy Monday folks!