Category: things to do

Categories
craft things to do

Project thanksgiving favors

i LOVE hosting…parties, showers, holidays…LOVE! so two years ago for thanksgiving we hosted and i thought it would be fun to have a little favor for all our guests 🙂 i decided on making something out of material because i really really wanted to learn how to use my new sewing machine and i figured what better way than to have a deadline.

i actually found a pattern online, can’t remember where but hopefully i can explain enough with photos. i also didn’t take photos of some steps so i’ll have to explain some of them, oops! there will be tips along the way and the full instructions at the bottom…hope you enjoy! i certainly love pulling out my little pumpkins each year.

the simplest and most tedious part of this craft is cutting all the material! i wanted lots of different types of colors so that the pumpkins would each be unique so i bought fat quarters instead of yards so i would have just enough and not a bunch of extra material. many times people ask me how i have time for all this stuff. jared and i like watching movies and tv shows, but i am not the kind of person that can just sit and watch something, i have to be doing something else…so i cut or sew or paint or any number of things i’m hoping to share on here at some point! i never have time to just dedicate to crafting.

these are the stems and leaves. the leaf pattern you can make yourself by drawing onto a piece of cardboard and then using that to cut the fabric. or you can probably find a good leaf from google images if you can’t draw. and then the stems are just made out of little squares that i hand sewed together into a cylinder. the idea that i had found did hand sewing on the leaf too to give it veins but i didn’t want to spend the time and i think they look cute as is.

Full Instructions:

1. cut long skinny ovals (like the above photo) out of fabric. cut 8 per pumpkin you’d like to make. make sure that the way the fabric stretches is the long way not the short way.

2. cut squares out of brown felt for the stems and leaf shapes from green felt for the leaves. hand sew the stem together and add veins in the leaves if desired.

3. with the sewing machine sew two of the pieces of fabric together on the inside side, making sure to leave the excess thread long on both ends (you will use these later). i also used two colors/designs of fabric so make sure to alternate if you are doing the same. continue this until you have four pieces sewn together. then repeat the process with the other four pieces, make sure for each that you keep the tips close together so that they aren’t mismatched. on either side sew in the stem and the leaf as well.

4. now you have two pieces, each with four ovals sewn together and one of the sides has a leaf and stem. sew them together on one side, and then most of the way on the other side, leaving room to turn it inside out. i found that leaving the hole on the bottom of the pumpkin made it easier to hide my hand stitching and i also made sure it didn’t go all the way to the tip of either end so that the bottom and top are completely closed (my first couple didn’t look so great so i learned this the hard way).

5. before you turn it right side in, take all the loose thread pieces and tie the top ones to the bottom ones, this will help to keep the pumpkin in more of a pumpkin shape than a circle. i really should have taken a photo of this because it’s hard to explain, but just play around with it, you’ll figure it out 🙂

6. turn pumpkin right side in and get super duper excited because it looks awesome!

7. fill with stuffing – i thought about filling some with potpourri or something spicy but didn’t…

8. hand sew the fill hole closed and you’re done!!

here’s what my table looked like with all the place settings. i love how they turned out!

mostly everyone loved the pumpkins, but then there’s always the fact that we live in the real world. for me that means i have brothers, and they threw the pumpkins at each other all evening…le sigh
enjoy! and happy thanksgiving!
Categories
play things to do

happy halloween from us!

morticia and gomez addams – dress and jacket from goodwill, wig bought online, other details from around the hous

Categories
eat things to do

you are what you eat part 1

eating healthy.

jared and i have made some big life changes since the spring. we’ve always been relatively healthy eaters, but we decided to make an actual effort to actively choose all the food that goes into our bodies. these bodies were given to us to take care of, and we were doing a B- job of it. some of our friends have asked us to share how we handle our all natural diet, so i’ll split it up over a couple blog posts 🙂 here’s where we started…

what we cut out:

preservatives, artificial food coloring, artificial flavors, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, soy, hormones, gmos (when possible), and artificial sweeteners (which we cut out long ago, see here)

what we’ve reduced:

wheat and corn products, refined sugars and processed foods in general (mainly because they include some or all of the above items)

what we’ve added:

fruits and vegetables (we never got enough vegetables), organic hormone free and grass fed meats, vitamins and herbs

it seems like a lot in a list but really it’s simple. we eat food that’s minimally processed, has all natural ingredients, and is organic and gmo free when possible…basically not taking any shortcuts. it’s behavior modification. it takes a little time at first, but when you get into good habits, it becomes easy. we’ve been at it for about 7 months now and it’s been great. some of you were following when i was doing my cooking posts incorporating vegetables so really this started even longer ago. i was trying to actively learn to cook because i realized that we eat much healthier when i’m cooking. the funny thing is that when we made this new change, i realized it’s a good thing i was trying to get in the habit of cooking because i pretty much have to cook to be able to control this new habit.

what we’ve learned:

the chemicals/food that we chose to cut out is pretty much in every processed food

it’s very hard to find bread with minimal ingredients (stay tuned, i may be looking to make my own at this point!)

it’s very hard to find meat (stay tuned, blog about this coming up)

it’s very easy to find good produce, california is awesome at farmer’s markets and jimbo’s has all organic produce (which makes it easy by not having to read labels)

shopping took more than twice as long when i first started, but now it’s back to a normal time (stay tuned for a post about where i buy things)

i thought eating organically and healthy would be more expensive but it’s turning out to be negligible (there will be bits and pieces about cost throughout subsequent posts)

so there you have it, feel free to ask questions or let me know what you want to hear about.

read part two here

Categories
asia mock places to go play reminisce things to do

mocktography

where it all started…if you’ve seen my facebook album full of what we call mocktography, you should know that it started way back in 2004. i was living abroad and before long, photos of statues and just posing and smiling became quite boring. i honestly don’t remember how we thought of it, but it became a hobby of ours, and jared and i have run with it. so here’s a few mock photos of when it all began.

we always enjoyed making other people pose to be part of the collection too 🙂

stay tuned for more fine art mocktography
Categories
oceania places to go reminisce things to do

where it all began..

we used to have this game called geo-safari when we were kids. my brothers and i got so good at the game that when the tv show where in the world is carmen san diego, started, we were in heaven! we wanted to be on that show and actually go to all those places they talked about.

but my love for travel did not start there, it started when we were pretty young and we had our first exchange student. she piqued my brother and my interests in traveling. we had exchange students every year for years from sweden, norway, denmark, france, holland, portugal, morocco,  and australia. we would talk to them any chance we got, learn how to count to 10 in their languages, and make fun of their eating habits (pizza and fried chicken with a fork and knife, don’t you know we eat with our hands!)

the first trip i took out of the country was by myself for five weeks, i went to australia to visit 5 exchange students. i saved all my babysitting money and went, and i was hooked. i was awed by God’s creation in a place i’d never seen or even dreamed of really. i enjoyed the culture, learning the differences in our versions of english, and seeing that the world was much bigger than a 15 year old could even imagine. i knew i had to see more, and learn more, and this is where it all began.

ALSO – do please notice my awesome fashion choices! oh wait, i had no idea how to dress myself for the better part of my life…

Categories
reminisce things to do

thoughts for a thursday

i was out with my dog this morning and i smelled it…the first inklings of fall. it was sort of a cotton candy and pumpkin smell, weird i know but i immediately longed for fall the second i caught a whiff, then it was gone. it got me to thinking about time and scared me a little because that meant it was going to be fall…FALL, wait, isn’t it still may??? no seriously, i’m still a little surprised that may is over and it’s the end of august. i know that people say time flies but man this is getting out of control. when you stop to look back and can lump things into years, like ‘wow, it’s been over a decade since high school’ or ‘i’ve been married almost five years’…i don’t want life to pass me by.  i think that’s why i feel so blessed to be able to capture life in photos or video. freeze a moment or moments to be able to relive them to the best of our human abilities.

i don’t really have a bucket list because i don’t want to set up unrealistic expectations for my life, and i just want to experience things as they happen, maybe i’m too easily pleased 🙂 the only ‘bucket list’ goal i ever had was to visit every country in the world…in this moment of thoughtfulness though,  i want to live in the moment, but i also want to be able to go back and remember details that i forgot about when i look back through pictures. i want others to remember joy. i want to remember what the world looked like in 1995 or 2002 or 2012, because it’s constantly changing and we are the historians of this century. i want my stories to be full of truth and by preserving memories i feel like that’s the best way to do it. i want to capture the beauty of God’s creation as best we can as humans. i want to feel emotion, texture, color, temperature and time through memories. i want to do something new, even if everything has already been done. i want to inspire, inspire people to live, to remember and to feel humility in the vast universe where we live. i want to be positive in every aspect of life, even if it hasn’t been perfect, because i have been blessed to be alive for 30 years and don’t want to take a single day for granted.