hostessing.

As you might have been able to tell from this post and this post, I love having people in our home. I love to get everything cleaned up and presentable, I love to keep house so it is warm and a smellin' yummy, I love making extra special foods for visitors (thank you Mel for making this possible!), really I just love going the extra mile so when others enter our small abode they feel welcomed and loved. I've always enjoyed doing these things, but it wasn't until recently that I realized why these things are so important. What spurred this realization, you ask?? Well, I read this blog post about housekeeping and it seriously changed my perspective of keeping house by like 99%. You should read it, again and again.

Last week I got to do all of these loved-filled-keeping-house-things as I hosted the salad/appetizer portion of our Relief Society's progressive dinner. I wont lie, I went back and read that blog post again because yes, I love it so much, and because she gives some great examples of how to help others see, smell, and most importantly feel that your house is a home.

So for this progressive dinner I was put on the "italian route." Six thirty rolled around and half of the ladies came on over to our place where we had some green salad and tasty bruschetta. Yum bruschetta! I could eat it allll day! Obviously outside of the delicious food (thanks Amber!) and the awesome company (for reals, I sure lucked out with the group that I got!) I had lots of fun putting these little "center pieces" together for the table to greet the ladies as they came inside from the nasty snow-blowing-everywhere weather.

Terribly trendy? Yes, terribly. Absolutely adorable? Chyeah! And oh so easy, too! This is how easy... buy "priced to sell" flowers at Miller's for $2.99, buy a pack of paper doilies at World of Variety for $1.50 (while you're actually looking for non existent 3-D adhesive something-or-others), find 5-ish smaller random glass jars in your house (I went with two tall baby food jars, an old Cholula jar, and two different jam jars), wrap a little twine around said jars, fill them with flowers and a little water, and throw 'em on the table with some doilies! Okay don't throw them on the table... but yeah, so easy! 

Now this guy, on the other hand... 

[recipe]

...was also so easy! And mega delicious... again, thank you Mel, from the bottom of my very stuffed stomach.

paper snowflakes: made with love.

In our little home we have a little strip of wall above our little breakfast bar that is perfect for little banners. I started using this space for banner hanging purposes last fall and have decided that there must never not be a banner hanging in this space. For Christmas I made this banner and for a few weeks now I have been meaning to make a winter-y one to fill the empty-unChristmasy-void. Taking down Christmas decorations is a sad, sad, cruel, job. Well... one morning I was trolling pinterest during Peter's nap and noticed that my sister had pinned every single Frozen themed party pin to ever exist ever and I just had to look into things a bit more because oh my heck guys, Frozen is so good! And if there's going to be a Frozen party I gotta be there!! I will FLY to IDAHO people, just to be at this party! Anywho... turns out Emily is the Key Club president and as I am very aware--since I was a key clubber myself in high school--she is in charge of decorating for the sweetheart dance coming up. The theme that they chose, you ask? 

"Love is an Open Door"

The part of the song that is ALWAYS stuck in my head. All day.

Okay, best idea ever guys! This got me thinking... so I did some more trolling on the pinterest and found my own little Frozen-esque decoration stuff... aka some heart incorporated paper snowflakes to make and hang in a banner format on the aforementioned black hole of wall [that cries at night to be covered in Christmas decorations].

Here are the paper snowflakes that I ended up with and how I ended up with them... mostly for Emily's sake. (:

I started by tracing a salad plate (about 8ish inches in diameter) onto light blue construction paper. 

I chose this paper mostly because I wanted the snowflakes to stand out against the white wall (of Christmas abyss). I almost when with red so the snowflakes could double as Valentine's day decorations but heck, I'll just make another banner once February rolls around! (: Anyway, the construction paper ended up being not too thick to work with (a good thing) however some of my snowflakes ended up being a bit flimsy when hung. So. If you have this flimsy problem post cutting I would say try making the snowflakes cool and 3D-ish with hot glue or something like unto hot glue to give them sort of a back bone. So yeah... after the tracing my circles on the construction paper I busted out my craftin' scissors and cut out all of the circles and folded them in half. Then, depending on the design that I wanted to do, I folded that half in half again, in thirds, or in half again for a third time. Got that? Good. 

For example... these lovely pieces were folded in thirds after the initial half fold.

(p.s. Emily, the part outlined it what it looks like all folded up so you can copy the ones that you like.)

These were folded into 6 chunks after the initial half. I found that getting six equal parts was easiest when I folded the half into thirds then folded each of those thirds in half in a fan-like formation. Definitely don't "roll" fold these, you'll end up with some goofy cuts. Haha I act like I am a snowflake cutting pro... maybe I'm the one just figuring all of this stuff out. Haha.

For you, Todd. (:

And our last snowflake was folded in half and half again.

There you have it. Like I said, I got some of the patterns off pinterest but some I kinda just made up. So, in your paper snowflake making endeavors, just do whatever the heck you want! I should also add that for lots of the smaller details I used my fabric cutting board and exacto knife... way way helpful. (:

Here are all of the lovely snowflakes "in banner format." I liked the white Christmas lights so much from the holidays that I dug them out again for this banner.

And as a bonus for the grandmas... here's Peter and his frozen rosy cheeks and rivers of snot post sledding with daddy. Gotta take advantage of the 15 degree weather! (:

read (pronounced "red") a book a month.

The truth is, I have never been much of a reader. I guess that's what happens when you're like a student or something the first 22 years of your life. These teacher/professor people highly advise that you read every single chapter in every single text book and if you're like me, you don't even have time to do that on top of homeworking, working, internshipping, churching, etc-ing. I think the last time I actually enjoyed reading for school was when I got to read The Goblet of Fire for literature circles in sixth grade. I'm sure there was some book in high school that I enjoyed but let's be real, I read a lot more spark notes than I am willing to admit. It's too bad really, I mean I missed out on some enjoyable books like The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, and every Shakespearean work known to man. Well last year I decided to start doing some make up reading and this is how I did... not a ton of classics that I would have read in high school. But at least I read, yeah? (:

(Good Wife really shouldn't count, it's more of a joke... but I wanted a
nice square image so on it went. Heck, I guess I could have added all
of the books that I've read to Peter too...)

I'm happy to report that I highly enjoyed every book that I read. Yes there were a couple that got "cut" for language and such that aren't pictured here... but overall I seriously would read eleven of those again and again and again. Matter of fact five of them were re-reads in the first place! This year, from the inspiration of my awesome sister, Emily, I am going to try to read more of the classics and really pretend like I'm back in high school.. but instead this time with all of the free reading time in the world. And minus the braces, selfish boy-craziness, rebellious nature, etc. Currently I'm reading Pride and Prejudice to kick off the year. Well actually, as we speak (as I type?) I am watching Pride and Prejudice (and eating some of Todd's leftover birthday ice cream...). 

On the que for this year...

Pride and Prejudice

To Kill a Mocking Bird

The The Fellowship of the Ring

The Two Towers

The Return of the King

Life of Pi

Three Cups of Tea

The First Phone Call From Heaven

Ender's Game

Mere Christianity (and some other little C.S. Lewis books)

The Power of Everyday Missionaries

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

The Work and the Glory (#3-4ish)

and I finally need to finish To the Rescue and The Alchemist

Haha that list didn't have as many classics as I thought it would. I'll get around to them, I promise.

What do you want to read this year?

"Re-tile" our kitchen table: check!

I'm finally getting around to writing about our table top redo that we did last summer. Once we finished the project Todd's dad asked for pictures week after week so I guess I can finally post some stuff for him now that he has stopped nagging for them. Baha just kidding Wes, I'm just lazy. So here they are... including some low quality instructions on how to do the project yourself. (: Okay let's be real, just go to the links that we used and follow those instructions. (links at the end of post)

The whole project started a while back when we finally lost one too many hamburgers in the cracks of the tiles on our old table top. It was one of those white tiled, yellow oak bordered ones that every Mormon and their dog has owned at one point in time. We got our table from my uncle who got it from my aunt... so it's been through a lot of kids, moves, states, etc. The base of the table is still pretty sturdy but as I mentioned the tiles on the top were cracked like crazy and collecting all sorts of eternal gunk. One day a while back Todd said he wanted to re-tile it but after google image searching for hours and not finding a design that we liked we decided to just completely build a new top for the table. I had been eyeing a few tops that had been floating (not trending, floating) around pinterest and we decided to go with the farm table. We found a couple helpful but semi-crazy how-to's online and got to work!

We spent a couple hours on a Saturday at the local Menards picking out our lumber and other ingredients. As for the lumber, I really liked the look of all of the knots and imperfections in the wood. Luckily, the lumber that comes with all of these "flaws" is the cheap stuff. (: Once we picked out the perfect flaws and made our purchases we got to work.

Todd started by taking the lumber to a friend's house and getting everything cut. Huge thanks to the Jones' for being our go-to project helper-outers. 

The next step was one of the more fun parts, mostly because in any other situation it would be kinda frowned upon. Since we (I? I don't know at what point I had Todd convinced that this was going to be a cool project haha) liked the beat up "flawed" look we decided to take things to the next level and literally beat up the wood. So... with hammers, and screws, and really anything that would make a dent in the wood we slammed, banged, and hammered the heck out of the wood until it had all sorts of fun engravings and cryptic messages in it. 

Next step was sanding... a lot of sanding. And it turns out that Todd is like a professional sander. During the sanding process I questioned his sanding abilities and learned that he sands things all of the time! How many times in my life do you think I have sanded wood?? Yeah like 5 times. I can't even think of any of those times though so it very well could be 0 times. Todd though, he's sanded like 38 times if not twice that. That's a lot of sanding! And all of that practice showed too! He did a super lovely job getting the lumber nice and smooth and stain-able. Thank you dear. (: xoxox

Step three... or four... I'm not counting haha... the "stain." Well, the first part of the stain. See, we didn't actually use a stain. As you can see by the picture below... a pot is holding the stain. That is because it is actually black tea. From EPIC. That we borrowed. Yup, the first half of the staining process was to brush black tea onto the wood. It didn't take terribly long to soak into the wood so I think throughout the day I was able to do about three coats during Peter's naps. Oh man, just thinking about opening the garage and letting the fresh air in while I worked... oh how nice the weather was last summer! It warms my frozen, -50 degree, windchilled soul. Come back summer! Please!!

Here's Peter not napping during one of the coats. Luckily he was a great sport during the whole process.

Before and after the black tea. Not a huge difference but that's okay, the acid in the tea will react to the next stain that will turn it into beautiful old grey barn wood. (:

Speaking of the next mystery stain... here it is. In all of it's stinky glory. This stain was pretty interesting to make. Pretty much you buy 0000 steel wool and "dissolve" it into vinegar. The tutorial that we used said that it would dissolve in 24 hours but I'm pretty sure we let ours sit for about a week. After a few days of no dissolving I stuck the end of a cheap wooden spoon in there to stir things up and still nothing. So, I took out the steel wool and ripped it into tiny pieces to hopefully help the process move along. The inside of the steel wool clump was super hot, so some sort of something something was going on in there, just not a whole lot of dissolving. Anyway, it kinda worked and once it was more-or-less dissolved we started to brush it onto the wood.

There was definitely a reaction with the acid in the tea and the wood started to get grey pretty quickly! Three coats later we called it good and moved on to the waxing step.

This is the step that I didn't get a picture of. Probably because it was nice and messy and handling a camera wasn't going to happen. I pretty much got a rag and wiped on and rubbed in about 3 nice thick layers of  this stuff and it made color wonderful! Who knew that the practically white pine could turn into a dark, warn, aged color.

Once the waxy stuff had settled in and dried up we lined everything up, carefully screwed in the support beams, and attached the new top to the base of the table!

No reveal picture yet. Hang in there.

Unfortunately the chairs of the table also needed the same treatment... and they had a thick nasty shelacky something on them that was a beast to get off. Sanding, scrapping, stripping, having nightmares... it took a lot of energy to redo these suckers.

Once they were finished I also had to do a few layers of white paint on the legs/back since I sanded off a bunch of it. Woops. Oh well, they needed to be repainted anyway and they look nice now. (:

And here we are, the table is mostly done. Some day I'll repaint the white on the base of the table but I am in absolutely no hurry to do that.

My favorite piece is the middle one. It took the stain/wax really well and has a lot of character to it.

Hello there Mr. Peter! 

Seriously though, doesn't that weather just look amazing right about now?? 

p.s. we used a combo of instructions from these two websites... 

This table re-do on Sweet Pickins as well as some help from Ana White's Rustic Table how-to.