Monday, February 14, 2011

Be Mine

Hope you are able to curl up with the one you love this Valentine's Day. <3

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Let there be MORE light!!! And groovy shadows...

This post is pretty self-explanatory, so I'll just let the pictures do the talking....








Cool huh?  :)  For sure cooler than when it looked like this...

If you haven't already checked it out...see the rest of our first floor House Tour here...

Note:  I did have to grind down the steel plate that mounts to the ceiling a little bit as the diameter was JUST slightly too big for the white, plastic cover piece to fit completely around it.  No big deal.  

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

A Royal Gathering

We promised to share highlights from Alex's birthday party with friends after we posted her actual birthday celebration - so here they are!

When two of her classmates had back to back parties on the Saturdays before and following her birthday, we knew we had to get creative.

We decided to try a Friday night party, unusual for 6 year olds, but it actually worked out great!  I picked up this adorable Princess Dress at TJ Maxx last summer and planned to hide it away until Christmas.  What usually ends up happening when I do things like this is

a) I forget about them totally or
b) I can't remember where I hid them. 

In this case, I forgot all about it until just before her birthday, so it served as the inspiration for her Princess Party.





We decided to host a movie night in our very own living room. The girls watched Disney's Princess & The Frog and we served popcorn and theater-style beverages (aka: Please don't spill this on our couch).  :) 



We moved our coffee table out of the way and freed up a ton of space to be filled with bean bag chairs, blankets and oversized pillows.




We weren't sure how long a room full of princesses would stay engaged, but to our surprise they (almost) made it through the whole flick!  Of course someone figured out that a pillow fight would be more fun, so we had to divert to gift opening and cake eating. 



She liked the cupcakes.  :)  And we liked that we had an excuse to do a taste test on a place we are considering for the wedding. They passed. 


 And we think the other girls really liked their party favors. 



Next year Alex says she wants a party with a "real cute pterodactyl" and the Easter Bunny.  Um....What?!  Sounds an awful lot like her idea to be a Dolphin-Bat for Halloween.  :)

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

ETSY

Etsy is officially on our list of  The Coolest Things We Wish We Would Have Come Up With First.

Also on the list: Facebook, Google and Pillow Pets.

I mean seriously, a pillow that is also a pet?  Pretty sure that's not a new thing.  Alex got 3 of them for Christmas and most of her friends got at least one too. Why didn't I think of/re-invent that!?

And while we are on the topic, I had an idea back in college to sell ballet flats in vending machines outside of bars/nightclubs.  And everyone laughed about it.  And now that such a thing exists --- I am seriously annoyed.  Bitter.  Very bitter.

Anyway, back to Etsy.  If you don't know what Etsy is or you haven't purchased anything from it, take a few minutes and check things out www.etsy.com.

We love all things vintage and DIY, so when we found Etsy, "Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage and supplies" from artists and collectors worldwide, it was only a matter of time before we snatched up a few items.  And when we realized our resident carpenter could craft a particularly "in demand" item for super cheap, (more on this later) we decided to open a shop of our own..... though we are still in the process and not officially up and running...just yet.

While we work on that, here are a few of our favorite Etsy finds and some of the things we (probably just me) have our eye on.

First up, if you are one of the thousands of followers that we have (truth: one of 19) than you may have noticed we recently changed the look of the blog.  The new header showcases a couple of our recent finds:

Hello Languages
This print was one of the first Etsy purchases we made.  We love just about anything in black & white and when I found this print via Madebygirl we snatched one up for our entryway.


Keep Calm Parody
Pictured alongside our Hello Languages, is a cute parody of the Keep Calm and Carry On prints that were printed by the British government in 1939 during the beginning of World War II.  They have become quite trendy in recent years.  Ours says: Freak Out and Throw Stuff.  We found it via EarmarkInvitations and we think it's pretty awesome.  :)




Back in the fall we also found Alex's adorable Panda Bear Halloween mask and more recently I picked up a bunch of handmade hair bows featuring little frogs with crowns.  The bows served as party favors for Alex's Movie Princess B-Day Party.  Highlights from this shin-dig are coming soon...

Anyway, the bows, at $1.50 a pop, were a much cooler party favor than your average goodie bag of plastic toys and sugar.  And when the shop owner guaranteed she could make them and ship them with an insane 3 day turn around time, the $15 project was well worth the price!



The hair bows are via littlehaily.  

Also, with our upcoming wedding, we have decided to buy---within reason---only things that can be re-purposed in our home.  We would also really like to make most of the decor ourselves. Finding supplies on the cheap has been the perfect option for our insane, but thrifty endeavor.  We'll detail these a little later, but we're excited about a couple of wedding projects that we have jump-started thanks to Etsy inspirations and/or actual purchases from Etsy shops.

We're saving any real reveals for the Big Day, but a sneak peek at a wedding mood board of sorts can't hurt.  Most of these ideas will come to life thanks to ideas we found on Etsy that we realized we could totally do ourselves. Drum roll.....


And now, for a couple of  items we (mainly me) have our eye on:



Something about this adorable print just screams "Buy Me!".  I don't know where it would go, but I think it's pretty cute.

Also this, if those heels were a little taller, or better yet, boots --- this could totally be us!



These are pretty cool, but we'll likely attempt these on our own:



And this:




 Not at that price! 

We have several other favorites, but for now, just wanted to share a little love for etsy.com.  Oh- and what about our Etsy shop?  Soon, we'll be selling these:
GIANT customizable letters and numbers.  Pretty cool huh? When we saw that these things, made from the same material, were going for $125.00 on Etsy --- and we are actually aware of people who have paid that---- we decided we had to get in on this trend.

We'll update when our shop officially opens!  And just FYI, we won't be selling them at such a high price point.

That's all for now!
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