Office decor

Someone in my office at work is expecting a baby and they are choosing to be surprised by the gender of the baby.  I had been thinking about making a sign for this persons office at work for awhile, and finally set aside some time to get to it!

The expecting mom is planning a nautical themed nursery.  She mentioned liking whales, so whales were my inspiration for the office decor.  I made a quick trip to Michaels to get just the right shade of pink and blue paper.

I surfed the internet to find a cute picture of a whale to use as my guide for sketching.  I sketched out the whale on construction paper.  There was a lot of erasing to get it just right.  I then cut out the shape of the whale on the construction paper and used it as my stencil for the actual paper I wanted to use.

After tracing and cutting out the whales on the solid colored paper, I then cut apart my construction paper stencil so that I could cut out the shape of the whale's belly in a patterned paper.  I then attached the patterned belly to the whale. 

I used a hole punch to get the eyes of the whales to be perfectly shaped, and I used a circle paper punch to structure the smiles. 

A bubbly blue piece of 12 x 12 scrapbooking paper serves as the background and gives a "water" look. 

Finally, I cut out wavy strips of white adhesive paper to look like waves in the water and placed them in a list format so that everyone at work can cast their vote as to whether they think the baby will be a girl or a boy.

What do you think?

Farmers' Market Finds

This week our farmers' market purchases were too perfect not to document. 

Pictured below:  white and pink hydrangeas, lettuce, blueberries, green beans, basil pesto, and raisin bread.

The hydrangeas cheer up the kitchen and make me reminisce of my blue and white hydrangea based bridal bouquet.
 
Lettuce is our staple farmers market purchase since our personal lettuce adventure has left us with clover leaf sized greens.  We'll eat the lettuce on sandwiches and salads throughout the week.

The blueberries are already gone.  Delicious!  While purchasing them we learned that there is a berry farm nearby that we will visit someday to pick berries on our own.

Green beans are on the menu for tomorrow, along with pasta covered in pesto.

The raisin bread is great toasted with butter for breakfast.

In sum, a delicious farmers' market purchase week!

Baseball Game

Confession:  Prior to this weekend I had never been to a real baseball game. 

Friday night we went to a local Lake Monsters baseball game.  The Ben & Jerry's truck took "Champ" (the Lake Champlain Monster) for a ride around the field to rile the crowd.

We settled into our general admission seats with beer and popcorn and enjoyed the game.

 

Despite the loss to the Tri-City Valley Cats, there was still a firework show after the game. 

IKEA Improvements

Over the weekend Hubs and I made a trip to IKEA.  We went with goals and after a few hours of roaming the showrooms we found exactly what we wanted.

Let's back track a little bit.

When we moved into our apartment we acquired a buffet style piece of furniture from a family member.  The family member was going to take the piece of furniture to the dump if we didn't want it, so we took it.  I thought it would be great for storing things and we could fix it up.

Below is a picture of the acquired buffet.  It looks worse because of the random items that were constantly on display.  Lantern?  Candles?  Pots and Pans?!?

Eventually, we both confessed that we didn't like the inherited piece of furniture.  It didn't look right, it wasn't "us," and we knew we could do better.  I am so, so happy with the results!

Here is the entry way table that we chose and below is the dramatic transformation...

We are planning to get a lamp to put on the table that will be connected to the light switch by the door.  It will be so pleasant to someday be able to turn on the light before stumbling all the way into the kitchen.  I'd like to get a lamp with some height in possibly a blue or wicker color.

There is a lot of white wall currently exposed above the entry table.  I'm debating putting together some sort of photo wall collage.  I'm recently loving photo wall collages on Pinterest.  (Like this, and this, and this.)

We also upgraded Hubs storage space.  He's been running out of room on his bookshelf.  Here's a shot of his old bookshelf mess...

 And the upgrade...

What do you think of our IKEA improvements?

Veggie Garden Update

Our plants have been growing, however, our harvest is small.

If you are wondering what all the orange plastic is in my plants, just know that Hubs is an engineer that cares very much for their growth and support (and he also loves to toy with his 3-D printer).

The green bean plants have been starting to dry up.  We decided that maybe it was time to eat the beans. 

Yes, we had a harvest of FIVE beans.  They were delicious.  We considered not eating one of them to see if we created magic beans, but our hunger got the best of us.

 

The tomato plants are getting larger, stronger, and better looking everyday.  My prediction is that by September we may have a few tomatoes to devour.

The lettuce confuses us.  The lettuce leaves are very tiny.  The leaves are the size of clover leaves.  Some of the leaves are turning white in color.  We think we may have over-crowded the lettuce planting.  We also suspect that our water must be treated with something that bleached the leaves.

The onion sprouts are very thin and grass-like.  Again, perhaps over-crowding is the reason?

There are also cucumbers and peppers planted in these planters, but their growth seems extremely stunted.

At last, a flower has bloomed in my experimental flower pot.  I received a packet of Cosmo seeds in the mail (for free) from some Gardening magazine that spammed me begging for me to subscribe.  I planted some seeds, not knowing what to expect, and today went outside to find this little beauty.

Yard Sale Trolling

Over the weekend Hubs and I did some yard sale trolling. 

Using the website www.yardsalesearch.com/ Hubs made a list of a few yard sales in the area.  Using our GPS we navigated streets we have never traveled before.

The yard sale that we thought would be the most promising, was actually the smallest.  It was weird because  the entire extended family was sitting out on their lawn.  The family got so quiet when we stopped to look through their items.  We did, however, end up purchasing a veggie platter for $1.00. 

One of the listings was a bust, with no sale in sight.  We even stopped at an unexpected yard sale we found along the way.  At another sale we scored the games Yahtzee and Blink for an awesome 50 cents each.

We only spent $2.00 (and some gas money) and we had a good time.  I recommend it as inexpensive entertainment, if you are into that kind of thing!


 

Bread Maker Bliss

Confession:  I love homemade bread.

I ordered a bread maker from Bed Bath & Beyond and it has arrived.  After purchasing bread flour and yeast we fired up the new machine.

As expected, the bread was delicious.  I can hardly wait to eat my lunch tomorrow at work, as I'll be making it with homemade delicious-ness.