Giveaway Day Winners!

 

Okay, the giveaways are over!  I used Random.org to pick some lucky winners, and they are as follows:

 

Congrats to the winners!  Check your email for details on how to claim your prize!

Giveaway Day { 3 of 3 }

{UPDATED: this giveaway has been extended until noon Monday!}

And that’s not all! My last and final giveaway item may be my favorite!…

How sweet is a teacup pin cushion!? I love it. Yes, I made one for myself already!

I am so smitten with these little things! I need to go thrift store hunting for teacups, like, NOW.

If you don’t sew, this would make a great gift!

To enter to win this tea cup pin cushion, made with love by yours truly, just leave a comment below! Giveaways will be closed for entries at noon Monday, January 31, 2011 and winners will be announced Monday. One entry per person please.

Good luck! :P

{And don’t miss giveaways 1 and 2 !}

Giveaway Day! { 2 of 3 }

{UPDATED: this giveaway has been extended until noon Monday!}

But wait, there’s more! My second giveaway today is a camera strap cover for your DSLR…

This slips over your DSLR strap, providing some much needed padding (those straps are so uncomfortable!) and a fun dose of personality. If you have photographer friends, you will no longer mistake their camera for yours with this…

This one should be pretty standard, but it was made to fit the kit strap for my Nikon D40. It measures 19 3/4 inches long and the inside width is a little over 1 1/2 inches. It has a fleece lining and a flannel backing so it is super soft.

If you don’t have a DSLR, it would make a great gift!

To enter to win this camera strap cover, made with love by yours truly, just leave a comment below! Giveaways will be closed for entries at noon Monday, January 31, 2011 and winners will be announced Monday. One entry per person please.

Good luck! :P

{And don’t miss giveaways 1 and 3 !}

Giveaway Day! { 1 of 3 }

{UPDATED: this giveaway has been extended until noon Monday!}

I woke up this morning practically chanting, “It’s today! It’s today!” (name that movie). I have been so excited to share my giveaways with you all! I crafted three items to give away to celebrate my blog’s one-year anniversary. I will do three separate posts, so you can enter to win only the item(s) you want!

With no further ado, here is the first item…

I love the bright punchy floral print, and the turquoise corduroy lining!

To enter to win this espresso cozy, made with love by yours truly, just leave a comment below! Giveaways will be closed for entries at noon Monday, January 31, 2011 and winners will be announced Monday. One entry per person please.

Good luck! :P

{And don’t miss giveaways 2 and 3 !}

Encouragement in Obedience

I was snooping around on the Anderson Crew’s blog when I came across this post.  Usually Mrs. Anderson encourages us and shares her activities with us, but this post was actually written by Mr. Anderson.  What an encouragement it was to me.  It is about stepping out in faith and obeying God, and worry later about the “whys” or “hows” or whether or not you can handle it.  If God only gave us things that were easy to check off our list on our own, would we really see His power?  He gives us more than we think we can handle so that we will seek Him and know His power and love for us.  I needed that and I thought you might be encouraged by it, too.  Our God is powerful!  You have faith?  Step out.  Even though I summarized, go read the whole post.  You’ll be glad you did!

 

I’m finishing up one last giveaway item and I hope to post the giveaways tomorrow!  Happy day!  =)

1 year / 140 posts

Do you know what I missed? My own blogiversary! I kept thinking it might be coming up and never looked it up until just now and it was on January 21st! One year and 140 posts later, here I am still sharing!

Looking back at my first post ever, I didn't know if I had it in me to keep at it. But, blogging has become such a fun and unique little hobby. Fun because I am a girl and what girl doesn't love gabbing, sharing ideas, successes and failures, and telling people what to do about this or that? And not unique because no one else has one, let's face it, dogs have blogs these days. But unique in and of itself. Blogging is just weird to me. Weird but I love it. It is weird that little old me has anything to share that you people actually care about (all 9 of you followers ;). It is weird that we read something in a post that we relate to and practically get warm butterflies in our tummies, like, "See? I knew there was someone else out there a little bit like me." and it somehow makes us feel good. It is weird that we then feel the need to comment and tell the blogger that they are just like us. It is weird that the blogger then reads our comment and has warm butterflies that someone out here is just like them! Like I said, the whole thing is kind of strange... or shall I say, unique.

Anyway, this is your heads up that I will be having a little giveaway soon! My goal is at the end of the month and three items to giveaway! I have been crafting and have two extra items on hand, and need to figure out one more. If you have been reading, and keep reading, you can probably guess what they are. So at the end of the month I think I will do three separate giveaway posts so you can enter or not enter whether you like the item or not.

So thanks for sticking around!

Chi and Alfredo

So I told you that the husb got me a Chi flat iron for Christmas and that I love it. I didn’t tell you that he got me this with it…

I didn’t tell you because I figured it was one of those things the sales girl recommends because it sounds like something you need and she gets paid on commission and needs to pay her parents back for getting her car fixed after she backed into a light pole in the mall parking lot.

I decided to use it so that I could know for sure that it didn’t work and could throw it out without guilt. Am I a horrible person? Let’s call it ‘skeptical’. Is that still bad?

Anyway, the stuff works really well!…

My mom is going to pee her pants at how dirty that mirror is. Funny thing is, she just arrived for a visit last night and this photo was last week and I still haven’t cleaned it. :P Am I the only bad housewife?

ANYWAY, the Chi worked wonders. The Flat Iron Spray put an extra special twinkle on it. It makes my hair like those girls with the flat hair that have to try to get volume. And the lovely non-frizzy flatness lasts so long – even the next day it is still flat! Love it.

But wait, there’s more!

Haha. I have a recipe to share, too...

Alfredo! If you’ve followed PW for a while, or searched her recipes, you may have seen it – she posted about it in 2009.

The recipe is unlike any other. I have found so many weird alfredo recipes – ones that call for a roux (against my religion; you cannot make alfredo with flour! Um, let’s have flour noodles with some flour sauce on them – no thanky), or weirder ones that call for cream cheese and claim to be the Olive Garden’s Recipe. Whatever.

No, friends, PW’s is the real deal. The only thing I change is her process and not because it doesn’t work – it is because I can never get everything done at the same time and it ends up cold. Oh yeah, and I add garlic powder.

The Parmesan cheese you select is the main flavor in the sauce so get a good one. PW always has fancy blocks of Parm; I am too lazy to figure out where to get them and which one is good, so I have found this widely available one to be delicious…

Her sauce has three ingredients:

1/2 cup butter

1 cup heavy cream

2 cups grated parmesan

And I add:

1/2 to 1 tsp garlic powder

You can read her process in her recipe, but what I do is melt the butter in a saucepan. As soon as it is melted add the cream and the parm and the garlic powder and warm (don’t even simmer it) until all the cheese melts and the sauce is toasty warm and smooth. I like to grind in a little black pepper in mine, too.

If I am going for presentation, of course I use fettuccini noodles and ideally I would have some fresh parsley to adorn it with, but for lunch…

When the kids are fussing and I am having LBSCBD (Low Blood Sugar Cranky Butt Disorder), anything goes! I put it over Penne noodles this time. I like to toss all the noodles in the sauce and then dump a little extra on top and add a bit of shredded parm on top of that when I'm going for presentation points.

In our house we make a double batch of the sauce and make these cheapo breadsticks from Safeway...

When they come out of the oven I brush the tops with butter and sprinkle them with garlic salt. Dip in Alfredo. Same as Olive Garden’s breadsticks, seriously. Try it.

PS- does anyone else have trouble making food look appetizing in photos? I could never be a food blogger.

A picture story…

I thought you could use a Saturday chuckle. The other day I was busy moving furniture around and playing with accessories. I moved the little side table from my bedroom to the living room…

Those are three great books by the way. The top one was recommended by Erika. The bottom two I found on my quest for colonial and primitive style ideas. Maybe someday I will find a nice big lamp that doesn’t need books to give it added height. =)

Anyway, as I was snapping away I realized something was going on behind me and started documenting that instead. It was way more interesting…

See who she was watching (above)?

To her disdain, he doesn’t miss a thing. She got found out…

A little flick and a “No-no, Susie!” (he was not really flicking her- he just pretends to be in charge ;) …

“Not again- Susie I said NO!” Spanky spanky…

Look at her toes! She lives on the edge!

“What?”

She managed to get her grubby little hands on a few of his items…

That must have been some sandwich!

Pottery Barn Deal

 

Okay, I was in Pottery Barn yesterday.  Again, I am not rich, I was shopping for a client.  That sounds really fancy, but she’s related to me, so it’s really not. 

I found these on clearance for 99 cents and had to snag six of them even if I never use them…

A little tricky to write on with chalk but I might finally have an excuse to buy some of those chalk markers like they use at Starbucks, so it’s all good. :)

Then, while checking out I remembered to ask about their Pottery Barn Bedrooms book I have been waiting to catch on sale.  They have a whole line of books including Bathrooms, Bedrooms, Living Rooms, Workspaces, Outdoor Spaces… I am forgetting at least one.  Anyway, she looked up Bedrooms and said she didn’t have any but U Village had 24 and they were on sale for $3.95!  They are regular $24.99!  I had her check the others in the series and they were all on sale so I snagged a couple, but it was hard work, because all their books are covered in brown paper!

A cute pain when you are searching for the last Living Rooms copy in the whole store!  I already had Bathrooms (from when I was working on the MIL’s bathroom.  Yesterday I added to my collection…

 

My favorite part is looking at the pictures; you can learn from their examples of arranging things, and there are ideas you can glean for organizing and do it on the cheap, too.  I flipped through Workspaces and snapped a few ideas…

 

That ladder with the string for mail is crazy!

 

Love the big containers with bulk office supplies – it makes me feel like I am doing important work.  I have a supply of matching pencils and a jar of paperclips on my desk.

 

Gonna have to look for one of those folding rulers at the next flea market.

 

Those pencils are in one of those straw jars that I gave to goodwill last year.  Darn.  That craft room is fresh and fun.

And, of course, they have nice covers and look great in your living space even without the brown paper ones…

e Mine have a bit of wear from floating around the store, but I don’t mind that. 

The books are no longer listed online, so I think they are going for good.  By the way, searching “book” on Pottery Barn only yielded one result.  I think their book bundles are taking the “found objects” trend a little too far.  Really?  A few old books with the covers torn off for $39.00!?

And I took the last 6 galvanized name plates they had in Alderwood, unless they had more upstairs!  =)  And they don’t seem to be online either.

How about you guys – do you have any good design books?

Fabric Flower Power

I had purchased this hat from Tarjay last summer…

I liked it but never wore it for some reason. Then I saw this fabric flower tutorial roundup and knew what I had to do…

So I already had the hot pink one on hand from when Leah and I sold pillows, I just added a couple buttons in the center. I made the twisted one (mine is not very twisty :( sad) and the spiral one off the tutorial. And now…

I wear it! I wore it to the grocery store the other day. Then I decided I may have had poor judgment and maybe it was too young for me. Then some people told me it was okay, so today I wore it and the employee at Pottery Barn complimented me on it! Now I magically feel like a million bucks in it! Funny how that works. And that is a darn good picture, considering I ran outside and told our Handyman Extraordinaire, “I need you to take a picture of me.” He turns out to be a half decent split-second photographer. He is an excellent handy man, too – if you have any household repairs, painting or woodwork to do, I would be happy to give you his information! And no, we are not rich, we trade babysitting for his services!

I also followed this camera strap cover tutorial. I failed at taking a picture of me wearing my camera in the mirror, so this is all you get…

You get the idea. It is made from a vintage pillow case (same as the spiral flower) and the mienke (sp?) is so soft and comfy but horrible to work with. I am making a couple as gifts but they are not getting meinke. Sorry peeps.

Other news…

Both chickens are laying!!! We had our first green egg yesterday!

Have a great evening! We are out the door to Awana. Tomorrow I will post about my PB experience today – you won’t want to miss it! =)