carrots and lace

or should I say lace and carrots?

I got this lace at VV a couple of days ago for 2 bucks. yup all that lace for two dolla! Do you know how much it would have cost at Joann's? So much that I wouldn't have bought it!

What does a modern girl, whose already married do with all this lace?

 Dye it of course!!!!!

I put all the lace into one pot o blue dye and they all came out at the same time. No joke. Dye gets picked up differently depending on the material. I used the Royal Blue from RIT and added a little of the Pearl Grey to soften it a bit.

Now the real question is....what am I going to do with it? I'll let you all stew on that for a bit while I go catch me some salmon.

In other news today, I picked some of my carrots. They are horribly small and I probably should have left them in the ground....except that I didn't thin out my seedlings and just planted them in the ground....bad idea. All of the carrots came out in one tug. Lesson learned, thin out your seedlings or this will happen:

They'll hug each other and never want to let go!

I must say that I really do like the two color together...and they'll probably taste alright. But carrots aren't meant to hug.

Sarah

a new seat for my feet

We got this ottoman with some money from our wedding shortly after being married. It's not super high quality, but it has storage for blankets and overall we've liked it!

But we may have liked it a little too much.

Over the past almost three years, this ottoman has seen 3 moves and was squashed in the Uhaul on the way up here.

It has received many scratches in the pleather and and it was starting to look a little ratty, not to mention the whole Lucy chewed in the corner.

So what do you think I did? Throw it away....yeah right!

I found some really nice upholstery fabric and Value Village for 6 bucks and I recovered it!

In these pictures it looks green...but it's actually a darker brown.

A little wrinkly, but not to shabby for 6 bucks! I also used some seat cushion batting that I had to give the top some oomph!

What do you think? My feet thank me:)

Sarah

linked to frugallysustainable.com

Bathtub paint

Aria loves to paint, mostly on herself and a little bit on the paper :) so cleanup sometimes involves a bath. I was pretty excited when I found a recipe for bath paints.
 It's super simple - 1T cornstarch
                             4-6 pumps of baby shampoo,
                             2-3 drops of food coloring
                             1-2tsps of water. 
I mixed mine in a cupcake tin and it worked perfectly. Aria rested it on her legs whlile she painted the walls and herself!

She had a ton of fun and loved all the bubbles in the water at the end! Clean up was a synch and she came out squeaky clean :).

Nathania

a little story about some pumpkin seeds

The scene is set in a lime green bowl on my kitchen island

Enter the raw pumkin seeds.  They're the star of the show.

Whats that? Oh no!!! The dark villian....maple syrup!!!

The cinnamon and a pinch of salt arrive to spice up the scene.

Mix it all up---oh the plot thickens!!! and spread it all out...it's quite delectable show...

Roast them all together at 250 for about 20 minutes and you'll have a grand finale.

A pretty tastey one too!

Hope you enjoyed the show!

Sarah

salsa....yummo!

Today I had a hankering for some fresh salsa. In Andy's hometown there is a place that his parents go to frequently to buy fresh pico. I wanted me some of that...but a trip to Michigan was too far out of the way, so I went to Freddy's instead.

I got peppers, cilantro, garlic, tomatoes--in the can and out--they are expensive here!, and onion.

Because I have an itty-bitty food processor I could only do one veggie at a time.

I chopped them all up  and mixed them together. It tastes exactly like the stuff in Michigan.

I used:

1 1/2 onion

4 cloves of garlic

3rd of a red pepper

1 jalepeno...I took most of the seeds out, if you leave them in be prepared for fire mouth

half a tomato and some cherry tomatoes that needed to go

half a can of drained diced tomatoes

handful of cilantro

It's perty too!

Hope you can enjoy some tastey goodness too!

Sarah

summer adventures

Hello Party People!!! Whats happening?

Well, lately I have been a terrible blogger....but with the weather we've had...who can blame me. I am officially tanner than I would have been if I lived in MI still. At least my arms, hands, face and a little bit of my legs...which for me is TAN!!

Wow, long tangent. Todays post is going to be more of a photo post of life lately.

Making food a rainbow is so much more fun to eat!

We got to hang out with these peeps for a week. Too bad the warm weather came the day they left, but it was still highly enjoyable!

(andy's siblings, Jordan and his wife Jodi, and his sister Emily)

Checking out the wildlife at the Conservation Center!

Lots O' babies there!

The lynx were out and about and beautiful!

and the tiger in the grass...oh wait thats Lucy!!!

We went camping at Eklutna lake...

this was our view:)

and came home to a beautiful rainbow! It was actually a double rainbowm but we couldn't pick it up with our camera!

How have you been enjoying your summer?

Sarah

I did it again....

So a month or so back I posted about how I had redone a bathroom in our house and had painted it orange....well more like fleshy brain matter...but I digress...I had painted one of the walls in a checker pattern with white. Below are a few pictures for you to remind yourself.

Well after about a month I decided it had too much of a brain matter color to it and the lines in the checker board weren't even. Every time I went in there it looked worse and worse to me. The straw that broke the camels back was the fact that neither Andy, myself or Nathania....liked it. It was ugly. I tried to like it. I really did...mostly cause I went through the hassle of painting it and it took FOREVER!

So, whats a girl to do when she hates the color of her bathroom and she has guests arriving in 2 days?

Mix up some paint of course!

We have this really pretty dark blue, but it was gonna be too dark for the small space. So I added some of the fresh green that I had painted our other bathroom with and voila! I had the color I wanted and didn't spend a dime. WOOHOO for being cheap!

 I then spent the next two days painting it, and putting up the towel rods again. I even put up a mirror, but that's a story for a whole different post.

Here is the result. What do you think? Improvement or not? I think its a vast improvement.

The color is truer in the bottom two pictures. We need to work on the light...think we're gonna add a light in with a new fan.

I haven't put the shelf back up yet, cause I'm not sure I like it. We'll see.

What have you been working on? Did you ever re-paint a room within two months?

Sarah